Brent Meeker writes (quoting SP):
> > You might say that a computer program has a two-way interaction with its
> > environment while a recording does not, but it is easy to imagine a situation
> > where this can be perfectly reproduced by a recording. In run no. 1, you start up
> > the computer program and have a conversation with it. In run no. 2 you start up
> > the computer program and play it the recording of your voice from run no. 1. As
> > far as the program is aware, it receives exactly the same inputs and goes through
> > exactly the same responses on both runs, but one is a recording and the other is
> > not. Run no. 2 is exactly analogous to a film: a fixed input resulting in a fixed
> > output, even though if the input had been different the output would also have
> > been different. I don't see how you could say that the computer is conscious in
> > run no. 1 but not in run no. 2.
>
> If the program is intelligent it'll be bored by 2. :-) You seem to mixing questions
> of discovering whether a program is intelligent, with what it means for it to be
> intelligent.
No, it won't be bored because there is no way for it to know that it is going through the
first or the second run. The point I was trying to make is that there is no real basis for
distinguishing between a recording and a program, and hence no basis for saying that
a program can be intelligent or conscious and a recording cannot. A corrolary to this is
that there can be no real distinction between program and data, or computer and
environment: they are just artificially segregated parts within a larger system. This
means that in general it is not possible to say whether a physical system is or isn't
implementing a computation, because the usual test of whether it handles counterfactuals
will not necessarily work. This would be a trivial result *unless* we say that a computation
can be conscious, in which case self-contained universes of conscious beings are hidden
all around us. To avoid this conclusion you either have to drop computationalism or drop
the idea that consciousness supervenes on physical activity.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Tue Aug 22 2006 - 22:37:18 PDT