[naasking]

> The computer that runs the VR (including the AI controlling the behaviour of the NPCs) might well be conscious, but the NPCs themselves are just pixels.

Where and how the information processing actually occurs to produce this intelligence doesn't seem relevant. The NPCs are individually either as intelligent as a person, and equally distinct, or they are not. If they are, they may be conscious. You said they are so intelligent, and therefore, you have no idea whether they are or are not conscious.

> It might sense some electrical signals originating from you and your friend's bodysuits, but that isn't going to feel anything like the experience you and your friend are having.

I don't see how that's relevant to whether the game system or NPCs are conscious.

[DonaldFisk]

I think we're arguing past each other here. I accept that the computer controlling the VR might be conscious of something while it runs the AI software, but the brains of the NPCs clearly aren't conscious. In fact, they don't even need to have brains. The computer isn't immersed in the VR the way you and your friend are. It doesn't use senses the same way you do.

[naasking]

> I accept that the computer controlling the VR might be conscious of something while it runs the AI software

But the AI software/algorithm is exactly what would produce the consciousness, if it were possible to do. So if it runs this algorithm individually for each NPC, then each NPC is conscious. And it clearly must run the algorithm individually because each NPC finds itself in different circumstances, and so must respond differently to its environment, even if they all share the same "personality".

> It doesn't use senses the same way you do.

I still don't see why that's relevant. Sensory inputs are still just inputs. The AI algorithm also has such inputs since each NPC must respond to its environment.

[DonaldFisk]

I think we'll end up agreeing to disagree here, but the AI would only be producing the appearance of consciousness in the NPCs. There's absolutely no reason to believe it experiences any of the qualia experienced by the people immersed in the VR. It doesn't see anything or hear anything. Only the people do, via their headsets. It just behaves as if it does, like the people on your television screen.

[naasking]

> There's absolutely no reason to believe it experiences any of the qualia experienced by the people immersed in the VR.

Firstly, NPCs tautologically don't experience the same qualia, but that doesn't mean they don't experience qualia of their own. Like I said, they respond to their environment, which means they have senses of a sort.

> It just behaves as if it does [produce consciousness], like the people on your television screen.

How do you know that? You're merely asserting p-zombies exist, you're not proving it.

[DonaldFisk]

If you were talking about humanoid robots in the physical world, you'd have a point, but in a VR, NPCs exist in much the same way images of people exist on your TV screen. They're not really there. They also exist in the form of data on the computer running the VR, but data can't be conscious either, as it's entirely passive, like words in a book the computer can read from and write to.

[naasking]

> They're not really there.

In what way can you prove you are "really there" in a way that a simulated entity is not? Fundamentally, your matter could very well be a mathematical construct -- see the Mathematical Universe hypothesis, for instance.

> They also exist in the form of data on the computer running the VR, but data can't be conscious either, as it's entirely passive, like words in a book the computer can read from and write to.

Except they're not, because the NPCs respond intelligently to you and their environment, both of which are always changing, so they aren't anything like passive, unchanging data. No one is claiming that data that isn't changing is conscious, but NPCs don't consist of unchanging data. So they could very well be conscious, and you haven't presented an argument why such intelligent responses would not require consciousness, you've merely been asserting it.

And it's not like you don't state that consciousness can't be a computation, because you've said that the game system as a whole might be conscious. So if we agree to assume for the sake of argument that consciousness is a computation, then it will be a particular kind of computation with a certain property, like how sorting algorithms sort their input.

Which means any algorithm that has this property produces consciousness. Furthermore, personality differences and sensory input from their environment would just be parameters to such an algorithm. And if game AI needs this consciousness property to make believably intelligent characters, which is what we've been discussing, then each of the NPCs will run this algorithm with their own personality and environment configurations, and each of them will be conscious.

The best I can infer about your argument is that these computations don't have access to "real" senses, but this point is entirely irrelevant. All AI senses will reduce to a set of numbers anyway, which means even if the "sensory" inputs we hook them up to are entirely simulated, this makes no difference to the consciousness algorithm. Consciousness would be a logical property, so you can't simultaneously accept that the game system could have consciousness, but the individual NPCs would not.