Comment by kaashif
If a computer can perfectly simulate a human brain, and I gradually replace my brain with computers, when do I cease being conscious?
If a computer can perfectly simulate a human brain, and I gradually replace my brain with computers, when do I cease being conscious?
But you’ve already conceded it’s a simulation, so never. The simulation is behavioral.
As Searle (and Kripke, respectively) rightly points out, computers are abstract mathematical formalisms. There is nothing physical about them. There is no necessary physical implementation for them. The physical implementation isn’t, strictly speaking, a computer in any objective sense, and the activity it performs is not objectively computation in any sense. Rather, we have constructed a machine that can simulate the formalism such that when we interpret its behavior, we can relate it to the formalism. The semantic content is entirely in the eye of the beholder. In this way, computers are like books in that books don’t actually contain any semantic content, only some bits of pigmentation arranged on cellulose sheets according to some predetermined interpretive convention that the reader has in his mind.
We can’t do this with mind, though. The mind is the seat of semantics and it’s where the buck stops.