> Would the simulated human have real subjective experience? No > way to find out as far as I can tell. I think that once you hold the view that living bei

> Would the simulated human have real subjective experience? No > way to find out as far as I can tell. I think that once you hold the view that living beings aren't "magic", that our behavior / wants / needs are just a result of the sum of our hardware as it were, you'll quickly realize that talking about "real" experiences doesn't make sense. Extrapolating from a simpler system can help to give clarity, e.g. does this Lego Robot who's running a complete simulation of a round worm's neural network feel "real" hunger when its food sensory neurons are stimulated? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_i1NKPzbjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_i1NKPzbjM Some might have the knee-jerk reaction of saying something to the effect of "of course it's not real, it's just a simulation running on some robot, it's not actually hungry". I think that falls apart when you consider the following: Suppose I had the technology to take an existing round worm and slowly replace its individual cells & copmonents with artificial equivalents, at what point would it stop having "real" feelings of hunger or anything else? I think the only sensible answer is to realize that the question doesn't make any sense. No more than asserting that moving a computer program from one computer to another makes its execution any less "real". > You can't even find out whether I have true subjective > experience. Maybe I'm just a machine acting as if I do. So maybe > it's a nonsensical question, but I have never found a satisfying > explanation for why exactly it's a nonsensical question. I think if we mapped your entire biology & neural network and uploaded it to the proverbial Lego Robot we could easily find out a lot of things about what's happening with your experience of the world. E.g. maybe you're in chronic pain, maybe you're hungry. Those things are just the result of biological processes in your body & brain. There's no reason to think subjective experience is anything inherently different. Edit: Added some clarifications.