| > In a simulation of a brain, from what substrate could consciousness emerge? Exactly the same substrate as our brains are derived from: physical particles and their interactions, perfectly replicated inside the simulation. If the simulation is accurate enough, the real particles and the simulated particles behave exactly the same, hence they produce the same results. > Do you think consciousness could emerge automatically from the state of the right subset of locations in RAM Hard question to answer since consciousness is hard to analyse. But we can turn it around into a question whose answer is the same, with a bit of rephrasing: Do you think consciousness could emerge automatically from the state of the right subset of particles in our physical world, or is it whenever a relevant particle state are changed due to particles interacting according to the laws of physics, etc etc > Consider also that physical reality runs in full parallel, We don't really know this to be the case. It looks like that to us, but that could easily be an illusion created by mechanisms we can't observe. Just as characters in a video game can't observe how their world is simulated - everything is perfectly consistent whether it was calculated in one CPU thread or several. |