>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 ha

>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.