If anyone is not familiar with David Chalmers "Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia" You should have a look at it<http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html>first.
This thought experiment is intended to generalize principles common to both computationalism and functionalism so that the often confusing objections surrounding their assumptions can be revealed. Say that we have the technology to scan the city of New York by means of releasing 100,000 specially fitted cats into the streets, which will return to the laboratory in a week's time with a fantastically large amount of data about what the cats see and feel, smell and taste, hear, their positions and movements relative to each other, etc. We now set about computing algorithms to simulate the functions of Brooklyn such that we can tear down Brooklyn completely and replace it with a simulation which causes cats released into the simulated environment to behave in the same way as they would have according to the history of their initial release. Indeed, cats in Manhattan travel to and from Brooklyn as usual. Perhaps to get this right, we had to take all of Brooklyn and grind it up in a giant blender until it becomes a paste of liquified corpses, garbage, concrete, wood, and glass, and then use this substrate to mold into objects that can be moved around remotely to suit the expectations of the cats. Armed with the confidence of the feline thumbs-up, we go ahead and replace Manhattan and the other boroughs in the same way, effectively turning a city of millions into a cat-friendly cemetery. While the experiment is not a PR success (Luddites and Fundamentalists complain loudly about a genocide), our cats assure us that all is well and the experiment is a great success. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/5BbVwrPfmSoJ. 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.
