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Article 5830 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: zlsiida@fs1.mcc.ac.uk (dave budd)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Grounding: Real vs. Virtual (formerly "on meaning")
Keywords: symbol, analog, Turing Test, robotics
Message-ID: <zlsiida.293@fs1.mcc.ac.uk>
Date: 21 May 92 09:14:25 GMT
Article-I.D.: fs1.zlsiida.293
References: <1992May20.150243.25894@psych.toronto.edu> <1992May20.191738.18644@mp.cs.niu.edu> <1992May20.221931.20652@news.media.mit.edu> <veq4jINN46u@agate.berkeley.edu>
Organization: Manchester Computing Centre
Lines: 63

In article <veq4jINN46u@agate.berkeley.edu> epfaith@purina.berkeley.edu (Edward Paul Faith) writes:

>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.

Your experimental setup implies that a whole brain is required for 
consciousness.  This is not implied by any 'real world' data that I know of.
And I'm pretty sure there are medical cases around in which consciousness 
carries on fine with various parts of the brain missing, including the 
separation of the lobes.  Unfortunately the only book I have handy is The 
Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, which has lots of wacky info on various 
brain conditions but isn't very useful as a textbook.

+----Great Quotes of our Time----------------------------------------+
|   I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy  |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+                                                                     
|  Dave Budd, MCC, Oxford Rd, Manchester, England  (44)061-275-6033  |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


