From: Matt Mahoney (matmahoney@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Mar 04 2009 - 08:33:28 MST
--- On Wed, 3/4/09, Toby Weston <lordlobster@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> If there is no detectable difference, then there is no
>> sense in asking the question.
> Not ok. This Dennet, Blckmore take on consciousness is
> lacking in that it does't help me understand the origin
> of subjective experience, whether my motives are purely
> philosophical or engineering oriented.
> In fact the statement that conciousness does not add
> anything is itself pointless: it helps understanding not one
> bit.
Perhaps the following will aid in understanding. If I hard wired your brain to connect the "2+2" neurons to your "5" neurons, you would not ask "what is 2+2?" You would ask "why does 2+2=5?"
> e.g.
> A super inteligent, but not conscious, AI recieves an
> upload. The company that owns the AI demos the newly
> uploaded person to it's family. It passes all sorts of
> tests - Turing style and White box - the audience concluded
> that this really is uncle Bert. It does not have a body, it
> is not a zombie, it is a set of responses that has fooled
> the room. It may require 10x the processing power of a human
> brain to run. In this example consciousness is a performance
> optimization allowing complex behaviour to run on smaller
> hardware/wetware.
> Uncle Bert is not conscious - this is not irrelevant for
> people considering the procedure.
So lets say that the upload service figures out an optimization that allows Bert to be simulated and pass all the tests as before with 1/10 the computing power. Does that make it conscious? Or are you saying that's impossible because currently the brain does 10% of your thinking and your consciousness (by some mysterious process) does the other 90%?
Or is it possible that 2+2=4?
-- Matt Mahoney, matmahoney@yahoo.com
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