X-Message-Number: 11673 Date: Tue, 04 May 1999 01:50:25 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Computer Games, Dreams, Isomorphism Thomas Donaldson, #11664, writes > >I also asked a question, seriously: if you believe that a character >living entirely in a computer and receiving only input from the computer >is aware, then do you also believe that characters in computer games are >aware? If not why not; if you do, please explain. Just what is the >difference between such characters and any more elaborate program >structure in a computer? > In my view, if the characters meet certain reasonable criteria (being able to respond in some appropriate way to their environment, including input from the outside) it woulid be reasonable to grant them a rudimentary awareness. Of course, such characters probably are less complex than insects, thus less aware than insects. I see no fundamental reason to deny that they could have awareness, however. >Some have also suggested that we might already be such an emulation. I >find this possibility not so much wrong as meaningless: sure, so we are >emulations. And just what does that really tell us? The idea has no >experimental content at all, just like a belief in God. > I would say it isn't a meaningless idea, because it raises the possibility that, at some point, there could be intervention from the outside, from the "Programmer," which might, for example tell us that up to then we have been in an emulation. Otherwise, you are right, and with Ockham's razor we can drop the hypothesis, as having no supporting evidence. However, it still is useful for a philosophical point. >Another participant points out that we can have dreams which feel like >reality. Fine. Since we have those dreams with our own biological brains, >and they feel like reality (but afterwards we see that they were not) >this has no obvious relation to the possibility of emulating a person >totally inside a computer. It does have a bearing on the issue of whether it would be possible to be conscious within some device, without any (obvious) connection to the outside world. Bob Ettinger, #11665, notes problems with the idea of assuming across the board, that systems isomorphic to conscious systems are conscious themselves. And I agree, that one can push the notion of isomorphism too far. What is needed, then, is not just any isomorphism whatever, but the right isomorphism. In particular, we are led to consider how time should be modeled. To my thinking, consciousness, whatever it is, involves some sort of ongoing process. It isn't present in a static artifact that undergoes no significant change over time. This would rule out a book being conscious, even if it is the kind of book that can model the passage of time, for example, by the changes described on successive pages (as in a history or a biography). Such an artifact (or a character within it) could not, in principle even, interact and respond to a person as we normally imagine conscious beings would do. It would have no behavior, could not originate actions, make choices, etc. Whereas the sort of entity that I have imagined being emulated, if awkwardly, by a Turing machine would possess these capabilities. (Maybe "emulation" is misleading to some here, because I do imagine that there could be communication between the emulation and an outside world.) So, if we grant that the Turing entity is an ongoing process with a suitable correspondence to a being we accept as conscious, with isomorphic, *active* processing going on, I would consider it conscious too. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11673