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There are documented cases of people in comas/full paralysis who later wake up and remember being conscious throughout the coma. If they never woke up to tell a

There are documented cases of people in comas/full paralysis who later wake up and remember being conscious throughout the coma. If they never woke up to tell anyone about it (or died before they had the chance to wake up) would they not have been conscious? We can of course observe that there is brain activity to some degree but I'm not sure that we would consider that output in a meaningful way anymore than something like side-channel analysis of a CPU. Further, who determines what inputs/outputs qualify as semantic? That would either require an outside observer (breaking the model of "I think therefore I am") or require the system itself to determine semantic value at which point there's no need for I/O to make the determination.

undersuit 4y ago
Is a computer not computing if it's not outputting? If I'm thinking for an extended period of time without telling other "people" my thoughts am I actually thinking? If a tree falls in a forest, and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
pdonis 4y ago
> If they never woke up to tell anyone about it (or died before they had the chance to wake up) would they not have been conscious? This is an edge case where one could say the person was (or might have been) conscious but nobody else ever got the chance to find out. In any concept like this we should expect edge cases. > who determines what inputs/outputs qualify as semantic? The function of the inputs/outputs in the overall function of the entity and how it relates to the rest of the world.