No offense, piggy, but it would help a bit if you grouped your posts a bit more.
I'll try, as well as I can. Probably won't last, tho. I have the opposite experience.
Irrelevant. A car that works on unleaded fuel and one that works on hydrogen fuel cells are both cars.
It's not irrelevant to the actual post I was responding to. Each of those cars needs a correct configuration of parts and some kind of "juice" to keep it going, just like your brain does.
Doesn't really matter what the juice is, as long as it works.
So my point stands that your brain does need a proper fuel and configuration. If we manage to build a conscious machine, it too will need something more than logic to make that happen.
And my point stands that you can't get behavior by programming alone and just enough hardware to support the programming... you've got to enable the behavior with real-world apparatus if you want real-world behavior.
And you think this is indication that simulated consciousnesses need the same configuration ?
Nope, that was never my point. But pain blindness, emotional blindness, and other such troubles in the brain indicate clearly that configuration matters in the brain.
That doesn't mean that no other configuration will work.
But it's rather absurd to think we'll have a solution in which it's irrelevant.
I thought it was to save money on dummy planes.
Regardless, the purpose of the simulation is to provide an illusion (for whatever reason) not to generate a real-world instance of flying. Remove the animal interpreter, and the illusion goes away, and you're left with lights and sounds and a big hunk of metal and plastic moving around a room.
Similarly, remove an animal interpreter from your simulation of a brain, and you're left with a machine that's doing something that doesn't resemble a brain at all.
The simulated brain is an illusion. A very useful one, but an illusion nonetheless.
The difference being, and this has been explained several times, that if consciousness is computation, and computation is computation, then simulations of consciousness by computation could indeed be conscious.
Repeating an unsupported and unsupportable idea doesn't make it somehow accurate.
Consciousness is behavior. If you want to create a machine that engages in it, you've got to build it to do so.
Calling that behavior a kind of "computation" doesn't change that fact. If what the brain does, and the heart does, and hurricanes do, and grandfather clocks do is all "computation", then, well, if you want to build something that does the same thing, then you have to build something that does the same kind of computation, but it has to be in happening in 4-D spacetime, not an unreal simulated digital world.
Simulations don't exist in reality ? That's news to me !
The simulators certainly do. But the things they're simulating don't.
If they did, you could power your town by creating a digital simulation of a nuclear power plant. But you can't, because the power plant doesn't exist in the real world -- it's an interpretation your brain gives to the computer's output, which is not at all similar to a nuclear power plant.
Those guys who are creating a neuron-level sim of the brain clearly understand this. They caution that it is only a "representation" and will not actually be conscious even if they succeed perfectly.
That's not a hijack. Whether consciousness can be simulated or copied is at the core of the debate.
It's at the core of the hijack. But you don't find folks who are studying the brain, and attempting to explain consciousness, obsessing over whether or not simulations could be conscious (they know they can't). They're not even worrying about making conscious machines, because they understand that we first have to understand how the brain does it, which we don't.
The answer to the question "Has consciousness been fully explained?" lies in brain science, and not in imaginary conscious machines that have not been built, not been designed, not been conceptualized.
Whether it's a simulation or a model, it exists in reality, like everything else. My comment was against the idea of a turing machine, which does NOT exist in reality.
The simulator exists in reality. The simulation requires that your brain understand a symbolic system and interpret things like lights on a screen to represent real things.
The model, on the other hand, exists in reality.
You can get hurt if a model plane flies into you and hits you in the head. You can get hurt if a computer running a sim falls off a shelf onto your toe. But you can't get hurt by colliding with a digitally simulated airplane because a simulated airplane can't collide with you because it's not real.
Enlighten me. What do brains do ?
That's a fascinating question, and largely unanswered, but back to my point, they clearly do not run digital simulations of brains.
And why not ? What's in the definition of "walking" that excludes walking in a simulated context ?
This is why questions about consciousness belong in the science forum, not in the philo forum.
Now we're musing about the definition of "walking" rather than following a logical line of argument.
The point of the discussion we were having was not to ponder linguistics.
If you want a machine to walk, you have to build it to walk. Making it run a digital simulation of a person strolling in the park will not enable the machine to walk.
And the same will be true of any other behavior you care to name. There's no reason to think consciousness is any different.
See my comments about computation above.
I did.
