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Article 5793 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: epfaith@purina.berkeley.edu (Edward Paul Faith)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Grounding: Real vs. Virtual (formerly "on meaning")
Keywords: symbol, analog, Turing Test, robotics
Message-ID: <veq4jINN46u@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 21 May 92 00:16:19 GMT
Article-I.D.: agate.veq4jINN46u
References: <1992May20.150243.25894@psych.toronto.edu> <1992May20.191738.18644@mp.cs.niu.edu> <1992May20.221931.20652@news.media.mit.edu>
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In article <1992May20.221931.20652@news.media.mit.edu> minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>In article <1992May20.191738.18644@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>>In article <1992May20.150243.25894@psych.toronto.edu> christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green) writes:
>
>
>>>That is, it would never see a cat, but only the image of a cat. Thus, its
>>>tokening of "cat" owuld not refer to cats.  It would never feel a scratch 
>>>on its arm, but only the "image" of a scratch on its arm. 
>>
>>  It can be argued that you never see a cat now, either, but only the image
>>of a cat.  In other words, what you perceive of vision is perhaps already
>>better thought of as a virtual reality, created by the brain as a way of
>>integrating input from the two eyes, perhaps from other sensory organs, and
>>information from memory.
>
>Right on.  And we can go a step further; the idea of the "brain" as a
>unit is equally defective.  Each part of your brain is immersed in a
>virtual reality, whose attribute are computer by another computer
>called "the rest of the brain and the rest of the world".  Really
>guys.  Are you ever going to question the fatal assumption that foulds
>the history of philosophy: that idea of a Singel Central Self, which
>"means" and "understands" and looks out through its eyes and "sees"
>the world?  Gosh, I'm tired of complaining about this.

Here is a problem which has bothered me for a
long time: 

Suppose we succeed in running a truly
conscious program on a computer made up of
two computers communicating to each other as
the right and left lobes of the brain do.  As we
run the program, we record the messages passed
back and forth from the left computer to the
right computer.  Later we reset the computers to
the initial conditions, but this time we only turn
on the left computer, and play back the signals
that we recorded earlier that the right computer
had sent to the left computer.  We could do this
if the implementation were perfectly digital,
since then we could anticipate completely the
behavior of the left computer in response to the
prerecorded signals.

My question is, would there be consciousness?
Would there be a sort of half-consciousness?  If
the thought experiment is flawed I invite anyone
to improve it.


