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Peter Gerdes's avatar

What does it mean to be "a computed feeling"? I understand what it would be to act like a person with certain feelings but maybe if you used different physical substrates you permute the actual feelings to differ from those that a human would experience with similar I/O.

At a more general level I'd note that the universe isn't actually very simple if you want to give a complete description. We tend to divide our description of the universe into simple dynamics and complex (Kolmogorov sense) initial conditions. However, note that there are many ways that you might embed computational like behavior in some ordered system (you could imagine ordered structures that 'compute' in some fashion but do so in what we would call a spatial dimension or something far weirder). Point is that there is arguably an anthropic argument going on here (the dynamics look simple to us bc thats only way you get complex computation via evolution) but it's not at all clear that argument should extend to phenomenology which seems irrelevant to evolutionary success -- a p-zombie would be no less favored).

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Agree. Note that I didn't put a probability on this specific outcome. It is an example of what people may try, not that it will be successful. It might. Society changes in surprising ways sometimes.

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