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If you buy into materialism, the idea that the mind arises from the brain through physics alone and nothing else, then your mind is able to be simulated on a bi
by zeroer 10y ago
If you buy into materialism, the idea that the mind arises from the brain through physics alone and nothing else, then your mind is able to be simulated on a big enough computer, which means that consciousness can be implemented by a machine shuffling around stones on an infinite desert.
(To be fair, materialism is not certain, though there's a lot of circumstantial evidence.)
In this view, consciousness is a class of computations. If your thrown bucket of sand does the same computations, then it would be conscious. Objects that don't aren't.
Are you trying to argue that for any way sand can fall out of your bucket, there's a way of mapping those falls to any computation you please so that any physical action can represent any consciousness?
- kybernetikos 10y ago> If you buy into materialism, the idea that the mind arises from the brain through physics alone and nothing else, then your mind is able to be simulated on a big enough computer Pretty much everyone believes that materialism implies the simulatability of everything physical, but that reality is computable is actually still only a widely held assumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing%E2%80%93Deutsch_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing%E2%80%93... We don't know nearly enough about reality to know confidently that it's something you can always simulate.