I don’t see how this differs at all from Searle’s Chinese room.
The “puzzle” is created by the mental picture we form in our heads when hearing the description. For Searle’s room, it’s a clerk in a room full of tiles, shuffling them between boxes; for yours, it’s a person sitting at a desk scratching on paper. Since the consciousness isn’t that of the human in the room, where is it? Surely not in a few scraps of paper.
But plug in the reality for how complex such simulations would actually have to be, if they were to actually simulate a human brain. Picture what the scenarios would look like running on sufficient fast-forward that we could converse with the simulated person.
You (the clerk inside) would be utterly invisible; you’d live billions of subjective years for every simulated nanosecond. And, since you’re just running a deterministic program, you would appear no more conscious to us than an electron appears conscious as it “runs” the laws of physics.
What we might see instead is a billion streams of paper, flowing too fast for the eye to follow, constantly splitting and connecting and shifting. Cataracts of fresh paper and pencils would be flowing in, somehow turning into marks on the pages. Reach in and grab a couple of pages, and we could see how the marks on one seemed to have some influence on those nearby, but when we try to follow any actual stimulus through to a response we get lost in a thousand divergent flows, that somehow recombine somewhere else moments later to produce an answer.
It’s not so obvious to me that this system isn’t conscious.
I don’t see how this differs at all from Searle’s Chinese room.
The “puzzle” is created by the mental picture we form in our heads when hearing the description. For Searle’s room, it’s a clerk in a room full of tiles, shuffling them between boxes; for yours, it’s a person sitting at a desk scratching on paper. Since the consciousness isn’t that of the human in the room, where is it? Surely not in a few scraps of paper.
But plug in the reality for how complex such simulations would actually have to be, if they were to actually simulate a human brain. Picture what the scenarios would look like running on sufficient fast-forward that we could converse with the simulated person.
You (the clerk inside) would be utterly invisible; you’d live billions of subjective years for every simulated nanosecond. And, since you’re just running a deterministic program, you would appear no more conscious to us than an electron appears conscious as it “runs” the laws of physics.
What we might see instead is a billion streams of paper, flowing too fast for the eye to follow, constantly splitting and connecting and shifting. Cataracts of fresh paper and pencils would be flowing in, somehow turning into marks on the pages. Reach in and grab a couple of pages, and we could see how the marks on one seemed to have some influence on those nearby, but when we try to follow any actual stimulus through to a response we get lost in a thousand divergent flows, that somehow recombine somewhere else moments later to produce an answer.
It’s not so obvious to me that this system isn’t conscious.