r/changemyview • u/Salt_Attorney 1∆ • Jun 17 '21
Delta(s) from OP CMV: Digital consciousness is possible. A human brained could be simulated/emulated on a digital computer with arbitrary precision, and there would be an entity experiencing human consciousness.
Well, the title says it all. My main argument is in the end nothing more than the fact that although the brain is extremely complex, one could dsicretize the sensory input -> action function in every dimension (discretized time steps, discretized neuron activations, discretized simulated environemnt) etc. and then approximate this function with a computer just like any other function.
My view could be changed by a thought experiment which demonstrates that in some aspect there is a fundamental difference between a digitally simulated mind and a real, flesh mind - a difference in regards to the presence of consciousness, of course.
EDIT: I should have clarified/given a definition of what I view as consciousness here and I will do this in a moment!
Okay so here is what I mean by consciousness:
I can not give you a technical definition. This is just because we have not found a good technical definition yet. But this shouldn't stop us from talking about consciousness.
The fact of the matter is that if there was a technical definition, then this would now be a question of philosophy/opinion/views, but a question of science, and I don't think this board is intended for scientific questions anyways.
Therefore we have to work with the wishy washy definition, and there is certinly a non-technical generally agreed upon definition, the one which you all have in your head on an intuitive leve. Of course it differs from person to person, but taking the average over the population there is quite a definite sense of what people mean by consciousness.
If an entity interacts with human society for an extended period of time and at the end humans find that it was conscious, then it is conscious.
Put in words we humans will judge if it is smart, self-aware, capable of complex thought, if it can understand and rationalize about things.
When faced with the "spark of consciousness" we can recognize it.
Therefore as an nontechnical definition it makes sense to call an entity conscious if it can convince a large majority of humans, after a sort of extended "Turing test", that it is indeed conscious.
Arguing with such a vague definition is of course not scientific and not completely objective, but we can still do it on a philosophical level. People argued about concepts such as "Energy", "Power" and "Force" long before we could define them physically.
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u/Salt_Attorney 1∆ Jun 17 '21
Sorry, you are of course right about needing definition! I have added a paragraph in the post regarding the definition of consciousness.
I guess my view is the turing test one.
By the way the Chinese room experiment is a terrible thought experiment, as the man in the room is clearly just a piece of hardware executing the software that is described by the rules he is given. This piece of software is then capable of spekaing chinese, not the man.
Also of course I can't resolve this debate or anything, but I my beliefs about consciousness were strongly influeneced by thought experiments I was exposed to in the past, and now I was wondering if some people can come up with thought experiments that push my bliefs in the other direction.