From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Apr 04 1999 - 21:16:36 MDT
hal@rain.org wrote:
>
> The problem is, I can't give a meaningful answer to the question.
> Any answer I could give about what larger external environment I might
> be a part of cannot be correct in most cases. Even if my consciousness
> only exists during a causally based run of a computer, it could still be
> run multiple times. Each time, I will behave in exactly the same way.
> (I am assuming that there are not uncomputable elements necessary
> for consciousness.) Each time, I will think exactly the same thing.
> If I think to myself, "*this* instance of my consciousness is happening
> on the third run of the experiment", I will think that every time.
> It has to be wrong most of the time.
I think we all agree that even if a million monkeys typing on a million
typewriters generated the paragraph above, it wouldn't make the Hal who
wrote it real. Only Hal's brain or a simulation thereof - being
instantiated - can put actual qualia behind the statement. It's not
enough to have the inputs and outputs in a Giant Lookup Table. So the
question is, if the playback was generated by random chance, can the Hal
it "records" be said to exist? Will he ever, even once, have said
"cogito ergo sum", or is there only a text-based representation of the
words? For the purposes of this argument we are *assuming* that an
actual neuron-by-neuron simulation would make the Hal real; the question
is, *given* that, does a randomly generated recording also make Hal real?
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
http://pobox.com/~sentience/singul_arity.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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