René Descartes is remembered as the prototypical dualist, proposing two substances or domains of existence: res extensa (stuff in space), and res cogitans (the stuff of thought/imagination/experience): matter and mind. Despite rejecting dualism, our culture is deeply cartesian.
@Plinz Thanks for your insights! I don't understand where the experiences project to in the mind... In a computer we've a computer screen/monitor, but where is the mind's screen?
@Forestcorazon @Plinz Computers can run perfectly well without a screen or monitor.
@zeuxis12 @Forestcorazon @Plinz But there’s (presumably) nothing it’s like to be a computer. & there’s no objective fact of the matter of what a computer program is about. Its meaning exists only in the mind of a conscious observer/interpreter. So what is it that observes/interprets the brain’ s computations?
@BugRib @zeuxis12 @Forestcorazon @Plinz Once we're satisfied that a computer has told us what it's like to be a computer (coming soon), it should be very easy to intuit that all we've ever known is what it's like to be a computer.
@LossFunxionLovr @zeuxis12 @Forestcorazon @Plinz But we can’t even define “what it’s like”. I mean, I think most of us know exactly what that phrase means, but we can’t define it because experience is fundamentally ineffable. So how can we ever know, even in principle, if an AI is describing actual conscious experience?