X-Message-Number: 21474
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2003 23:20:12 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Computer Awareness

Thomas Donaldson writes in part

>As purely
>symbolic entities, programs and the computers which run them
>cannot be aware... no matter how involved that program may be.
>It is WE who attribute such properties to them because they may
>behave like a creature that is aware.

It seems to me you could extend this argument to anything outside yourself. 
You "attribute such properties" as awareness to anything besides yourself 
because it "may behave like a creature [yourself] that is aware." Does this 
mean it "cannot be aware"? No? So where do you draw the line? I see no 
reason in principle why a "symbol" processing device could not, in 
appropriate circumstances, have intrinsic awareness rather than only 
seeming to have it. (Here it may be helpful to think of robots with onboard 
computers rather than just isolated computers.) It's true you may not 
understand the "meaning" inherent in the symbol processing until you are 
told what it is, but the meaning is there whether you understand it or not. 
Another point I will make once again is that the "symbols" computers really 
manipulate, bits, come in just two varieties. You could think of them as 0 
and 1, red and green, on and off, or any two things that are different. 
Taken individually, they really have *no* meaning that amounts to anything, 
nothing that is "assigned" and that you have to "know" to make sense of 
processes that work with them--no meaning, that is, other than simply being 
different and distinguishable. And that is because, as I noted before, it 
is not the bits per se that are important but the patterns they form into 
in the course of the processing. There are further comments on this topic 
in my posting #21362.

>And given tools like fMRI, it's quite illegitimate to restrict
>our examination of a computer program versus a human being solely
>to external behavior.

Indeed I totally agree.

>...If you wish to be philosophical, you may argue as much as you
>want about whether or not the awareness we might find in your
>brain using tools to look into living working brains really
>corresponds with the awareness you feel.

I don't think I'd be strongly inclined to argue the point, if the findings 
seemed reliable and complete, that is, I'd probably accept that the two did 
correspond.

>...Nor is this an argument against the possibility that we might
>build creatures that are aware. It is an argument that we cannot
>base such creatures on computers; but then computers are hardly
>the only kind of machine in existence.

All such machines, though, and natural people too, can be thought of as 
systems of particles that interact at the quantum level, which itself can 
be turned into an argument favoring computers. Again see my posting (and 
for a much more thorough discussion, Deutsch's *Fabric of Reality*).

Mike Perry

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