On Jul 23, 6:49 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > On 22 Jul 2011, at 17:11, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > I believe in zombies as far as it would be possible to simulate a > > human presence with a YouTube flip book as I described, or a to > > simulate a human brain digitally which would be zombies as far as > > having any internal awareness beyond the semiconductor experience of > > permittivity/permeability/wattage, etc. > > So they would behave like you and me, yet have consciousness of > permittivity/permeability/wattage?
The overall presentation would respond in a human like way to the outside human observer. They might not fool a cat or a baby. Internally, yes, just one enormously complicated glassy molecule. A megamolecule rather than a meta-meta-meta-molecule (cell-organism- nervous system). > > I'm saying that we human beings consider them to be in the future and > > the past, not that there is a future or past. > > I am not sure I understand what you mean. As living human beings, we are particpants in (our) cosmic Runtime. Qualia is our access to exo-Runtime from within it. It's like our lifeline to the infinite. I like to say 'If electricity is about pushing waves through particles, then sense is about pulling wholes through holes'. Holes being openings in the mask or mesh which separates neuron from neuron, DNA from cytoplasm, eyeball from brain, light source from retina, etc. Wholes being coherent meaningful gestalts or experiences. The qualia themselves are experienced in Runtime, but they are pieces of the firmament beyond Runtime, which is the singularity, where causality and time-space emerge from. When I see blue, I see all the blue that ever was, and perhaps all that ever will be. Through the limited holes of my particular neurological organism-within-an-organism capability of course. > You are the one disallowing subjectivity to some entities, based on > their 'number skin'. You are the reductionist here, telling us that > only wet human brain can think. > On the contrary, mechanism, when well understood, is a vaccine against > reductionism, even against reductionism of robots and numbers. Oh, no, I just mean making an entity out of something other than us will require more than a top level emulation of our external behaviors. If you made a nanobot that could produce self replicating molecules which self elaborated to cell, tissue, and organ equivalents, then you may very well get a kind of life form with a kind of consciousness, I just think that it will be a different kind of consciousness from our own depending on how different the whole physiology is. There may be some kind of anthropological experiential residue at the somatic level though too. It's hard to say. I'm just looking at the current technology and saying that you can't spin a brain out of glass, you have to have a few major technological breakthroughs in materials and synthetic biology first. Even still, I don't know that it will do you much good because the final product, if it is alive, will be just as hard to wrangle as any other living organism. Silicon is too polite of a material to embody the ferocity and volatility of life. It's an ontological oxymoron. > Thought/consciousness exists only in the arithmetical platonia. > Digital emulation makes them only relatively accessible to universal > machines, relatively to other universal machines. I know this is a bit > a subtle counter-intuitive point. What if thought/consciousness INsists through the physical universe instead? > Comp explains where the laws of physics come from, and this without > eliminating the person and souls. Does it explain where comp comes from? Craig http://s33light.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
