On Aug 4, 2013 7:13 AM, "Adam P. Goucher" <apgoucher@gmx.com> wrote:
It is unlike anything whatsoever that is covered by physics. As far
as physics is concerned (and I am not blaming physics for this), the world could just be a totally insensate machine that follows physical laws but feels nothing.
Could it? Is philosopher's zombie possible? It seems to me unlikely
that one could
construct, grow, or otherwise have something that looks and acts and is physically like a human being but has no subjective experience.
Making something look like a human is not difficult. Nor is making something `physically like' a human being. The only one of those things that is actually hard to replicate is human behaviour.
We can simulate neural networks on computers, and they're becoming gradually more intelligent as time progresses. For instance, I think they've been able to design electronic circuits and produce art, amongst other things. Together with natural language processing and database accessing (such as Wolfram Alpha), and knowledge acquisition (such as IBM Watson), it wouldn't surprise me if a machine passes the Turing test within the next decade or so.
Also, computers are provably not conscious, since they can be emulated by Turing machines, which are obviously not conscious*.
It's not obvious to me.
* If they were conscious, then _everything_ of sufficient complexity would have the capability of consciousness.
It's called the "dancing pixies problem" in the literature. I frankly don't see why it's a problem: consciousness isn't worth much without memory and the rest of the functions of the brain. We don't think there's much to the experience of being an ant, much less an amoeba or a virus; why then worry about the experience inherent in a randomly chosen physical process?
And as Geoff Xia showed us, the n-body problem enables particles to be projected to infinity in finite time, one corollary of which is Turing-completeness, so `sufficient complexity' means `a few elementary particles'.
Sincerely,
Adam P. Goucher
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