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Article 3449 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Strong AI and panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Feb3.113723.2519@arizona.edu>
Date: 3 Feb 92 18:37:21 GMT
References: <1992Jan29.204959.6332@psych.toronto.edu> 
 <1992Jan31.153800.8987@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <1992Jan31.193524.28969@psych.toronto.edu> <1992Jan31.233453.7625@news.media.mit.edu>
Reply-To: bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs)
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In article <1992Jan31.233453.7625@news.media.mit.edu> 
minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
> [ . . . ]   I, too, have been
>sorely puzzled why so many people insist that being situated in the
>world -- or having some kind of "grounding" for "meaning" -- has
>anything to do with consciousness or semantics or such things.  No
>matter that many distinguished philosophers have said so.  We can
>manufacture unbelievably intersting "virtual" worlds.
>
>What's more, I don't even see why those formal systems even need to be
>run on real computers, if they are specified complete with their
>environments.  Those virtual beings, just as "conscious" as me and
>(presumably) you, can lead arbitrarily rich, imaginative lives, or
>whatever.
>
  Well, here's the problem, as I see it:  

  Consider an arbitrary rock, and an arbitrary finite state
automaton.  There exists a mapping from vibrational states
of the rock to states of the FSA which preserves the state
transition function of the FSA.  (The mapping is probably
time-dependent, but so what?)  Under this mapping, the rock
is performing the same computation as the FSA.

  Therefore, if an FSA can be conscious, and consciousness is
merely a matter of performing the right sort of computation,
then a rock can be conscious.

  What's wrong with this reasoning?

	-- Bill


