Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!vlsi_lib
From: vlsi_lib@netcom.com (Gerard Malecki)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and consciousness
Message-ID: <vlsi_libD003s9.81J@netcom.com>
Organization: VLSI Libraries Incorporated
References: <3ao22m$qi4@news1.shell> <3b0q2b$b25@newsbf01.news.aol.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 1994 23:26:33 GMT
Lines: 27

In article <3b0q2b$b25@newsbf01.news.aol.com> jrstern@aol.com (JRStern) writes:
>In <3almm5$ar7@news1.shell> hfinney@shell.portal.com (Hal) writes:
> : How about a replay of a program trace?  Would that be conscious? 
>
>As conscious as the first time.
>
>Josh
>

I am reposting a gedaken experiment that I posted more than a month ago.
We beam parallel laser beams into space, one beam for each bit of a
computer, it being turned on when the bit is 1 and turned off when the
bit is 0. Now the whole program trace is replayed in any  plane
perpendicular to the direction of the beams, taking the presence of
optically excited atoms to represent logic levels in that plane. Also,
given any two planes distant d apart, the replays for those two planes
differ in time by d/c where c is the velocity of light. Since there are
an infinite number of such planes, the question is: Does each of those
infinite number of planes have its own consciousness? Or are they just
one collective conscious entity? If the latter is true, what is the
time lag between the consciousness of the laser beams and that of the
source (computer)?


Shankar Ramakrishnan
shankar@vlibs.com

