| > Would you agree that you are conscious at this point? Of course, I'm having a conscious experience replying four days late. > Would you agree that there are some set of physical laws, an initial state, and a set of random events to the universe that we inhabit? We inhabit a universe modelled by laws physicists have arrived at to describe observed behavior. That's as far as I'm willing to go ontologically. > Would you agree if we simulate this initial state on a computer, and step through it using the set of physical laws, and the random events, we will see the eventual emergence "you", who we know is conscious? No, I don't think computation is conscious. It's abstract symbol processing. > So are you saying that the entity inside the simulation is a zombie who is not actually conscious? Yes, it wouldn't be me. I don't think simulating the world is the same thing as the world itself, despite all the science fiction stories to the contrary. |