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Say we had a very detailed world simulation running on a massive server farm, like you see in some SciFi stories. Would the characters inhabiting this world hav

Say we had a very detailed world simulation running on a massive server farm, like you see in some SciFi stories. Would the characters inhabiting this world have conscious experiences? They consist of complex bit patterns, or more accurately, electricity. If you think they would, then let's take it one step further. A billion Chinese people are tasked with writing out the 1s and 0s on paper to implement the world simulation. This may take generations and the felling of forests, but it's done. Would the process of writing down that program result conscious experiences the same as if the program was run on digital computers? What about when the task is done? Would the paper be conscious or the ink on it? What if all the papers were separated by thousands of miles? If you've read Greg Egan's Permutation City, then a similar sort of questioning was explored with the uploaded brain copies. The author ends up with his own weird "dust theory of consciousness", because there really isn't a good explanation for why any physical state would be conscious.

ppod 8y ago
>Say we had a very detailed world simulation running on a massive server farm, like you see in some SciFi stories. Would the characters inhabiting this world have conscious experiences? They consist of complex bit patterns, or more accurately, electricity. I think yes. I find the arguments for functionalism convincing. After this you're rehashing Searle's Chinese room. As I've said, 'conscious experience' is not a properly defined concept, so I can only answer for what my own impressionistic judgement of its meaning is. For me, the entire system of people writing could maybe be described as having an experience if it directly encoded causally connected perceptions and actions of an agent in the virtual world. The whole thing is so far from how we use the word 'experience' that it is, as Dijkstra said, as interesting as asking whether a submarine can swim --- that is, not interesting at all.
mjrpes 8y ago
Of all thought experiments, I've found the billion workers communicating with 1 and 0's to be the strongest illustration of the mind/body problem. It is just absurd at that point to believe consciousness could reside there. I've wondered, too, whether there is a connection between the mind/body problem and the problem of existence (why is there something rather than nothing). These two problems seem to be fundamentally insurmountable.
- mr_toad 8y ago
  > It is just absurd at that point to believe consciousness could reside there. You’re just begging the question. ‘It sounds absurd’, is not a cogent argument.
  - mjrpes 8y ago
    I gave my intuition. There is no argument here.
- mcguire 8y ago
  "It is just absurd at that point to believe consciousness could reside there." At the risk of losing my junior philosopher's secret decoder ring, I feel the need to point out that most philosophical writing is an elaborate logical ediface erected in support of the writer's previously existing, unreasoned prejudices.

ppod 8y ago

>Say we had a very detailed world simulation running on a massive server farm, like you see in some SciFi stories. Would the characters inhabiting this world have conscious experiences? They consist of complex bit patterns, or more accurately, electricity. I think yes. I find the arguments for functionalism convincing. After this you're rehashing Searle's Chinese room. As I've said, 'conscious experience' is not a properly defined concept, so I can only answer for what my own impressionistic judgement of its meaning is. For me, the entire system of people writing could maybe be described as having an experience if it directly encoded causally connected perceptions and actions of an agent in the virtual world. The whole thing is so far from how we use the word 'experience' that it is, as Dijkstra said, as interesting as asking whether a submarine can swim --- that is, not interesting at all.

mjrpes 8y ago

Of all thought experiments, I've found the billion workers communicating with 1 and 0's to be the strongest illustration of the mind/body problem. It is just absurd at that point to believe consciousness could reside there. I've wondered, too, whether there is a connection between the mind/body problem and the problem of existence (why is there something rather than nothing). These two problems seem to be fundamentally insurmountable.

mr_toad 8y ago
> It is just absurd at that point to believe consciousness could reside there. You’re just begging the question. ‘It sounds absurd’, is not a cogent argument.
- mjrpes 8y ago
  I gave my intuition. There is no argument here.
mcguire 8y ago
"It is just absurd at that point to believe consciousness could reside there." At the risk of losing my junior philosopher's secret decoder ring, I feel the need to point out that most philosophical writing is an elaborate logical ediface erected in support of the writer's previously existing, unreasoned prejudices.