Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos  Agreed. So let's consider an unborn fetus. Can you describe what he feels the first time he stubs his toe in the uterus? No, you cannot. It's quite likely he feels nothing, because he has not learned to hurt. How long do we have to run the simulator before we expect typical pain feelings?
Please describe how we determine whether the program is "conscious in itself."
Why not?
~~ Paul |
I thought it was commonly accepted that foetuses can feel pain towards the end of pregnancy. However, this is totally irrelevant, because the simulation can start with your brain exactly as it is - with a life time of conditioning - combine it with various inputs, and generate an output. This process is really checking a theorem, and it seems pretty nonsensical to expect it to be conscious!
By 'conscious in itself', I mean that the computers can do all sorts of things if they have additional hardware attached, but you don't really want to specify additional hardware (because it is damn hard to think of what it might be - other than a Ψ-detector), so you are talking about a bare computer being conscious just because it is doing a calculation!
Do you
really think that a pass of Turing's test in the manner I described would be valid? The amount of programming involved would be minimal, the thing would just be a gimmick.
David