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Re:Are you living in a computer simulation? [pdf] by simonh on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @12:45PM (#23008821)
I'd like to pick on one particular issue related to substrate independence. I recently watched an interview with John Searle in which he proposed that a simulated brain would not be conscious. His reasoning was that a weather simulation in a computer couldn't make anything wet.

If that's true then the simulation argument fails. I'm not convinced though. It seems to me that the materialist argument, and Searle seems to be a materialist, is that consciousness is an emergent property of neuronal activity which is basically a form of computation. Well simulated weather isn't weather, but computer simulated computations are actually computations.

So while I am highly skeptical of the simulation argument, I don't object to it in this respect. Also I feel bad disagreeing with Searle as I think he gets so much else right and has made many very valuable contributions.

Re:Are you living in a computer simulation? [pdf] by mannykannot on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @12:00AM (#23015198)
As far as I can tell, Searle's physicalism takes the form of regarding mind as a property of physical brains, analogously to how water has the wetting property.

It is certainly true that a purely digital model of a conscious brain could not perform any of the physical actions that a conscious person can do, such as actually move chess pieces, but the addition of actuators for such interventions in the physical world is not conceptually problematical, and clearly beside the point.

Talk of properties, without inquiring more deeply, was pilloried by Molière in a rather well-known comment:

"It is asked what the cause and reason are of opium's making one sleep.

"To which I respond: because there is in it a dormitive virtue whose nature it is to put the senses to sleep."

It also tends to give rise to positions such as a disbelief that iron ships could float, on the grounds that iron, unlike wood, lacks the buoyancy property. The generalized fallacy here lies in taking a lack of knowledge for proof that something is necessarily the case.

There is no need to feel bad about disagreeing wth Searle - he is not lacking in self-confidence, and I imagine he would laugh at the thought.

Re:Are you living in a computer simulation? [pdf] by naasking on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @12:57PM (#23008975)
Searle is definitely not a materialist, but a dualist. His take on the simulation argument is that simulations cannot be built (possibility #1 in Bostrom's argment).
Re:Are you living in a computer simulation? [pdf] by simonh on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @01:07PM (#23009099)
Searle does believe that consciousness is caused by physical processes in the brain. However he also believes in what he calls 'Biological Naturalism' whereby consciousness can only be generated by biological systems.

So Searle does not agree that consciousness is a product of or a form of computation, which is where he and I part ways.

Re:Are you living in a computer simulation? [pdf] by naasking on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @11:13AM (#23020198)
His naturalism doesn't seem coherent. If no physical system can compute incomputable functions, then it's special pleading to insist that there's a difference between natural laws and mathematical laws.