The elephant in the room of the assembled Gaian biomorphs is the Human capacity for discerning meaning. Meaning and consciousness are very much related.
It seems to me a sufficiently precise simulation would necessarily capture meaning. If meaning is critical to decision making and that decision making is precisely simulated, then the simulation must also capture meaning.
All of it. It has no idea that it's playing a board game, or even what a board game is.
That it's even playing Go is a human interpretation of what the machine is doing. Granted, we gave it that interpretation in the form of software instructions. But to the machine, it makes no difference.
Within the context of Go there is no board game, its just sets of possible states and transitions between valid states. Any feature of the game Go is encoded within this state space. The "meaning" of pieces, moves, captures, win, loss, etc are all encoded here. The go playing machine may not capture these concepts explicitly at a high level, but I'm not sure that's an important distinction.
Concepts like board games, people, ancient Chinese culture, etc are all external to Go.
Well, actually the human context of Go includes something entirely unavailable to our mechanical constructs, yet very much an aspect of the human conscious experience: pleasure.
Yeah, but the encoding of the possible states, etc are all based on the actual board game. We made an abstract version of the game and fed it to a learning algorithm.
A go playing machine certainly has to have some equivalent representation of "piece", "move", "capture", etc. These concepts have meaning within the context of Go as a set of valid board states and transitions. Understanding these fundamental features of the game is required for proper decision making within this context.
I subscribe to the school of thought that asserts that meaning is the product of the act of reading form.
So we consider the space of meaning and each point in that space can map to a multiplicity of (possibly similar or possibly entirely distinct) forms. The mapping function is the sentient actor extracting/projecting meaning from[/to] form.
It seems to me a sufficiently precise simulation would necessarily capture meaning. If meaning is critical to decision making and that decision making is precisely simulated, then the simulation must also capture meaning.