Peter Jones writes:
> The difference between conscious and non-conscious computations is that the latter do not need an observer, or an interaction with the environment, to be meaningful. Take a very simple physical system like an abacus: you slide 2 beads to the left, then another 3 beads, count how many beads there are now on the left, and the abacus has computed 2+3=5. Next, you look out the window, see 2 birds land on a wire, then another 3 birds, count a total of 5 birds, and the bird-wire system has also computed 2+3=5. Or you observe a flock of birds of which 2 are red landing on a tree, and another flock of which 3 are red landing on the neighbouring tree, count all the red birds, and that system has now computed 2+3=5. Clearly there are countless physical systems everywhere computing 2+3=5, but only a small proportion of them are interesting: those which are meaningful to an observer. (Whether you say the accidental computations are not really worthy of the term "computation", or perhaps should be called "potential computations", is a matter of taste, and does not change the facts).
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> > Now, suppose some more complex variant of 3+2=3 implemented on your abacus has consciousness associated with it, which is just one of the tenets of computationalism. Some time later, you are walking in the Amazon rain forest and notice that
> > ****under a certain mapping****
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> > of birds to beads and trees to wires, the forest is implementing the same computation as your abacus was. So if your abacus was conscious, and computationalism is true, the tree-bird sytem should also be conscious.
>
> No necessarily, because the mapping is required too. Why should
> it still be conscious if no-one is around to make the mapping.
Are you claiming that a conscious machine stops being conscious if its designers die
and all the information about how it works is lost?
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Sat Sep 09 2006 - 00:39:52 PDT