Saphra Deden wrote...
Yes!
A brain must be organic and it must possess neurons, incorporating many chemical interactions as well.
I disagree that consciousness can be created by anything which simulates the processes of a brain. We simply don't know enough about brains or consciousness itself.
I'm surprised you can so blatantly contradict yourself. You claim that consciousness cannot be created by anything that simulates a brain, but acknowledge that you don't know enough about brains or the consciousness itself.
But either way, you don't need to understand how the brain works to know that a simulation is possible. Chemical interactions and interactions between neurons can all be simulated with a computer.
If you wanted you could simultate a universe with a powerful enough computer by creating digital atoms or subatomic particles and accurately simulating how they interact with eachother.
Perhaps you should try explaining why the brain can't be simulated if you know how it works.
After all, we just had a poster here arguing that consciousness could exist completely separate from the body, existing even in rocks. Do you think that's possible?
That sounds like a ridiculuos, exaggerated interpretation of your own if anything.
My position is this: consciousness is the result of our unique, organic brains. The same with the sensation of pain. You could build a machine that senses the environment, including damage to itself, and have it react appropriately. However I do not believe it would feel pain. Pain can only be felt by something which has an organic nervous system and brain like ours.
Pain is not a requirement of consciousness. It is only a means to an end, a way the brain receives information.
Of course a synthetic wouldn't perceive this information the same way an organic does, but that does not exclude them from having consciousness, it would simply be a different one.
I say again that two things which fulfill the same function are not necessarily the same thing. They are different. This can be very important.
I'm not suggesting organics and synthetics are the same thing, but I'm saying that I place value in the fact that they fulfill the same function, rather than how that is made possible.
Humans have legs and spiders have legs. However their legs, while serving the same purpose, are very different in their design and operation. A human leg has bone and muscle. A spider leg has an exo-skeleton and operates on what is basically a hydraulic system.
Like I said above, they serve the same purpose, and that is what is valued. The fact that there is more than one way to do it (two legs, compared to eight) just makes things more interesting.
So you can have a machine which reproduces and reacts to its environment, but it's experience is nothing like a human's or even an animals. It is more like a virus than a monkey. It exists without life, sustaing no actual life functions, but is still capable of taking actions under the right circumstances. What I mean is, if a virus recieves the right "inputs" it can do things which make it seem to be alive.
Virus aren't commonly regarded as being alive however.
I know that, I'm not suggesting that the geth experience the world like humans do. They certainy don't.
Also, there is more than one definition of life. The geth would not be considered alive in the organic sense because they are not organic. The standards used to determine whether an organic is alive cannot be used with the geth. A more common definitino can be applied though, where they are alive in the sense that they're functioning, meaning they perceive and respond to reality.
Concsciousness does not have a definition that precludes it from being applied to things that aren't organic like the geth.
Are you going to respond to my art fraud example?
I think I did respond to that by stating how it wasn't appropriate.
When applied to this discussion, you'd be interested in something that looks the same. Whether that piece is a fraud or not is irrelevant since it looks the same. Value is placed in the looks.
Your emulator behaves identical to the real console, but it is not the console. If you take a console game you can't play it in the emulator since there is no slot to put it in.
I don't think your example really works though since essentially you are just taking one computer and swapping it for another. You could write down that emulator on paper as well, including the game, and everything, and play it out by hand if you wanted. The same with the physical console.
This is the same thing you've said previously, which seems to amount to saying that the geth are not humans. That is obvious. That doesn't mean they're not conscious however. They don't have human consciousness, they have geth consciousness.
Let's me ask you another question:
If we reach a point at which we can break an entire person's mind down into computer code and we write that code down on paper and start giving it the approrpriate inputs so that the code perfectly simulates the person's mind, on paper, is it really that person? If you burned the paper you'd written all this code down on would it be murder? Would the simulated mind you are interacting with be real, would it be experiencing anything?
It would really be
a person. Not an organic person of course, but a person.
If you burned all the paper, I imagine it would be the equivalent of standing next to a nuke when it detonates. You'd be vaporized before you could comprehend it. Yes, it would be murder, assuming the word murder isn't limited to beings that are organic.
My point is there is a fundamental difference between a real being and a simulated one. As of ME2 geth are simulated beings, not real ones. The physical bodies we interact with are completely secondary to what geth are. They're just physical vessels to allow the geth programs to interact with the environment.
You cannot transplant a human's mind in another vessel. It is the unique result of that physical brain. You can however transplant or copy a geth into as many vessels as you like.
Of course there is a fundamental difference, but that doesn't mean that the geth aren't conscious beings. They are simply very different ones.
i understand where you're coming from now, and I don't think we're on the same wavelength. I'm not suggesting that the geth are just like organics, but that being different doesn't mean they can't have things in common with organics like consciousness.
The definition of conscious is "aware of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc." I think that the geth are certainly conscious based on that. They're simply not conscious in the same way that we are.
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