Likewise a Turing machine could perhaps compute everything there was to know about consciousness and its effects—but perhaps it still couldn’t actually produce one.
What’s the claim here?
That an abstract Turing machine could not be conscious (or better: contain conscious beings.)
That if a physical Turing machine (let’s just say “computer”) is carrying out a ‘causally closed’ computation, in the sense that once it starts it no longer receives input from outside, then “no minds are created”. (E.g. If it’s simulating a universe containing intelligent observers then none of the simulated observers have minds.)
That regardless of how a physical computer is ‘hooked up’ to the world, something about the fact that it’s a computer (rather than a person) prevents it from being conscious.
I suspect the truth of (1) would be a tautology for you (as part of what it means for something to be an abstract entity). And presumably you would agree with the rest of us that (3) is almost certainly false. So really it just comes down to (2).
For me, (2) seems exactly as plausible as the idea that there could be a distant ‘zombie planet’ (perhaps beyond the cosmological horizon) containing Physically Real People who for some reason lack consciousness. After all, it would be just as causally isolated from us as the simulation. And I don’t think simulation is an ‘absolute notion’. I think one can devise smooth spectrums of scenarios ranging from things that you would call ‘clearly a simulation’ to things that you would call ‘clearly not a simulation’.
What’s the claim here?
That an abstract Turing machine could not be conscious (or better: contain conscious beings.)
That if a physical Turing machine (let’s just say “computer”) is carrying out a ‘causally closed’ computation, in the sense that once it starts it no longer receives input from outside, then “no minds are created”. (E.g. If it’s simulating a universe containing intelligent observers then none of the simulated observers have minds.)
That regardless of how a physical computer is ‘hooked up’ to the world, something about the fact that it’s a computer (rather than a person) prevents it from being conscious.
I suspect the truth of (1) would be a tautology for you (as part of what it means for something to be an abstract entity). And presumably you would agree with the rest of us that (3) is almost certainly false. So really it just comes down to (2).
For me, (2) seems exactly as plausible as the idea that there could be a distant ‘zombie planet’ (perhaps beyond the cosmological horizon) containing Physically Real People who for some reason lack consciousness. After all, it would be just as causally isolated from us as the simulation. And I don’t think simulation is an ‘absolute notion’. I think one can devise smooth spectrums of scenarios ranging from things that you would call ‘clearly a simulation’ to things that you would call ‘clearly not a simulation’.