I’ll try and clarify the questions which came out as nonsense merely due to being phrased badly (rather than philosophical disagreement).
5: I basically meant, “can you simulate a human brain on a computer?”. The “any degree of accuracy” thing was just to try and prevent arguments of the kind “well you haven’t modelled every single atom in every single neuron”, while accepting that a crude chatbot isn’t good enough.
7: By “Theory of everything” I mean a set of axioms that will in principle predict the result of any physics experiment. Would you expect to see equations such as “consciousness = f(x), qualia = g(x)”? Or would you instead say “these equations describe the physical world to any required level of detail, yet I still don’t see where the consciousness comes from”? (EDIT: I’m still not making sense here, so it may be best just to ignore this one)
8: People seem more eager to taboo the word “real” than the word “conscious”. Not sure there’s much I can do to rephrase this one. I wrote it in order to frame q9, which was easier to phrase in terms of reality than consciousness.
9: Sorry for the inferential distance. I was basically referring to the concept some people here call “reality fluid”. A better question might be: how do you resolve Eliezer Yudkowsky’s little confusion here?
I’ll try and clarify the questions which came out as nonsense merely due to being phrased badly (rather than philosophical disagreement).
5: I basically meant, “can you simulate a human brain on a computer?”. The “any degree of accuracy” thing was just to try and prevent arguments of the kind “well you haven’t modelled every single atom in every single neuron”, while accepting that a crude chatbot isn’t good enough.
7: By “Theory of everything” I mean a set of axioms that will in principle predict the result of any physics experiment. Would you expect to see equations such as “consciousness = f(x), qualia = g(x)”? Or would you instead say “these equations describe the physical world to any required level of detail, yet I still don’t see where the consciousness comes from”? (EDIT: I’m still not making sense here, so it may be best just to ignore this one)
8: People seem more eager to taboo the word “real” than the word “conscious”. Not sure there’s much I can do to rephrase this one. I wrote it in order to frame q9, which was easier to phrase in terms of reality than consciousness.
9: Sorry for the inferential distance. I was basically referring to the concept some people here call “reality fluid”. A better question might be: how do you resolve Eliezer Yudkowsky’s little confusion here?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/
11: This question is referring to q2-10 only.