Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2015-05-06 9:19 GMT+02:00 Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.auQuentin Anciaux wrote:2015-05-06 8:47 GMT+02:00 Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au <mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au> <mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au <mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>>>: Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2015-05-06 1:24 GMT+02:00 meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net> <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> It would be proof that your consciousness could be realized in a digital computer In the end it is just a program and the external world is only memory location the program can access... What you call "captors", "camera"... are only device which produce digital information which mapped on the memory the program has access to... If your consciousness is uploaded in a digital machine and *computation alone* (no magic involved) makes you conscious... the "external" world, is just memory location the program that support your consciousness can access. No, it is an address via which you can access an I/O device to the external world. No it's an address of memory you can read or write to... you have no access to the external world... The fact that the I/O device also read and write to that same memory locations, allows the program to have digital information that the device write to that locations... but you can remove the I/O device and simulate its input/output, the programwith *can't* know that it is not "talking" to the I/O device, from it's point of view, it's the same thing... it's reading/writing a memory locaction. The program *has absolutely* no real access to anything external. No *guaranteed* access to such an I/O device to the external world. But that was covered in what I said before -- you could be a brain in a vat -- solipsism cannot ever be ruled out. But your I/O devices give you access to whatever real world there is, and there is nothing to be gained by just assuming that you are being fooled.That's *not* what I said, it's not a question of being fooled or not... the program *only* has access to *memory locations*... and nothing else. That those memory locations are written by a "real" device giving you access to a digital representation of some external world (I recall the premiss: *you are a conscious program running on a digital computer*) you can only infer that the datas at that memory location *represent* (in the context of the program) some external "real" thing... That's why *you have to* extract physics from that *because* that's the *only* thing you have access to (as a program). You have *no access (at all) to this inferred real world*. You only have access to memory locations that you can read or write...
Or, if you are a flesh and blood person with a brain, access to sensory input through your eyes, ears, skin, and so on. It is not so very different -- we have to construct an operating model of the 'external' world from the information we have to hand. If part of our brain is replaced with a computer, nothing really changes. It does not mean that it has to come from asking a computer what it thinks about things.
These are eternal, and insoluble problems. So we get on with life..... Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
