My second assumption is physicalism ( cf. Phenomenal binding is immensely adaptive ( cf. Waking consciousness is immensely adaptive. But you’d risk starving to death or getting eaten. Like your enteric nervous system (the “brain-in-the-gut”), your mind-brain would still be a fabulously complex information-processing system. if you were just an aggregate of 86 billion membrane-bound neuronal “pixels” of experience - then you’d be helpless. The point is that if you couldn’t experience multiple feature-bound phenomenal objects - i.e. Let’s for now postpone discussion of how our skull-bound minds are capable of such an extraordinary feat of real-time virtual world-making. The external environment is an inference, not a given. These perceptual objects populate your virtual world of experience from the sky above to your body-image below. Unless you have the neurological syndromes of simultanagnosia (the inability to experience more than one object at once) or akinetopsia (“motion blindness”), you can simultaneously experience a host of dynamic objects - for example, multiple players on a football pitch, or a pride of hungry lions. Consciousness is also your entire phenomenal world-simulation - what naïve realists call the publicly accessible external world.
#Digital sentience definition serial#
The subjective contents of your consciousness aren’t merely a phenomenally thin and subtle serial stream of logico-linguistic thought-episodes playing out behind your forehead, residual after-images when you close your eyes, inner feelings and emotions and so forth. Inferential realism about the external world is true. The first background assumption might seem scarcely relevant to your question. Naturally, one or both assumptions can be challenged, though I think they are well-motivated. Ascribing sentience to digital computers or silicon robots is, I believe, a form of anthropomorphic projection - a projection their designers encourage by giving their creations cutesy names (“Watson”, “Sophia”, “Alexa” etc).īefore explaining my reasons for believing that digital computers are zombies, I will lay out two background assumptions.
#Digital sentience definition software#
Digital computers and the software they run are not phenomenally-bound subjects of experience ( cf. Well, as a scientific rationalist, I’m an unbeliever. The “ explanatory gap” is still unbridged. The existence of machine consciousness hasn’t been derived from first principles. I think most believers in digital sentience would recognise that the above considerations are not a rigorous argument for the existence of inorganic machine consciousness. Accordingly, the belief that non-biological information-processing machines can’t support consciousness is arbitrary. Moreover, the state-space of all possible minds is immense, embracing not just the consciousness of traditional and enhanced biological lifeforms, but also artificial digital minds and maybe digital superintelligence. Therefore, the behaviour of our minds can in principle be emulated by a digital computer. If our minds weren’t identical with brain states, then dualism would be true ( cf. Our conscious minds must be identical with states of the brain.
It’s commonly believed that the behaviour of a human brain can, in principle, be emulated on a classical Turing machine. By “substrate-neutral”, we mean that whether a Turing machine is physically constituted of silicon or carbon or gallium oxide (etc) makes no functional difference to the execution of the program it runs. A classical Turing machine is substrate-neutral. Any well-defined cognitive task that the human mind can perform could also be performed by a programmable digital computer ( cf. As far as I can tell, many if not most believers in digital sentience tend to reason along the following lines. But the computer metaphor of mind seems to offer us clues ( cf. Consciousness is widely recognised to be scientifically unexplained. Perhaps we can start by asking why so many people believe that our machines will become conscious ( cf. Could you explain why, in simple terms?ĭP: Sure. MV: You are skeptical about the possibility of digital sentience. The aim of this conversation is to probe Pearce so as to shed greater - or perhaps most of all simpler - light on why he is skeptical, and thus to hopefully advance the discussions on this issue among altruists working to reduce future suffering. My sense, however, is that these expositions do not always manage to clearly convey the core, and actually very simple reasons underlying Pearce’s skepticism of digital sentience. Pearce has written and spoken elaborately about his views on consciousness. Many people appear to treat the possibility, if not indeed the imminence, of digital sentience as a foregone conclusion. Whether digital sentience is possible would seem to matter greatly for our priorities, and so gaining even slightly more refined views on this matter could be quite valuable.
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