Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos  Why couldn't a computer brain simulation have a "little man"?
But if the Leggo parts were made out of metal, then you could build a working radio.
But that leaves us with my original question: How does moving consciousness out of the brain solve the "little man" problem?
~~ Paul |
Well, the LEGGO parts would need to be made of metal and semiconductors and some of them would need to be resistors - but of course it was an analogy.
I know it isn't much of an answer, but if you don't require that consciousness be created by physical 'stuff' but simply exist like electrons exist, you don't have a problem - you just have a new component to the universe. That does not, of course, mean that you couldn't have a science that studied mental 'stuff' - indeed the preliminary version is called psychology and maybe parapsychology, but you would get away from the impossibility of making a radio out of non-conducting plastic bricks! Another analogy would be the impossibility of explaining electrostatic attraction within Newtonian physics (i.e. without adding the new concept of electric charge).
Why can't a little man exist inside a computer - well as I have argued before, all a computer really does is check equations of the form input+P=>output. If the program is conscious while it is doing the checking, why not the abstract equation - which delocalises the consciousness over all space-time!
David