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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32962 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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I don’t see much of a difference between a simulated qualia of feeling the heart racing and having a simulated heart that races.

Those are completely different things, though. A heart is a physical object made of atoms, and it has various physical characteristics that you would need to simulate in order to be said to be actually "simulating a heart," such as pumping simulated blood in a certain way or responding to simulated electrical stimulation in a certain way, etc. depending on how precise you want the simulation to be. If all you want is the qualia of feeling your heart, that doesn't require any of that.

It sounds like you were just using "simulation" in a different way, as to mean "qualia of feeling it" instead of something more like an "a model that imitates it." But then by the way you used it, it renders your original statement, the one that kicked this whole discussion off, pointless:

To have qualia you would have to simulate more than a brain, as qualia isn’t just felt or (in many cases) felt at all in the brain.

If by "simulate more than a brain" you meant something like "also simulate the heart and stomach and etc. where qualia is felt," and by "simulation of the heart" you just mean "the qualia of feeling one's heart" rather than "a model that imitates the heart," then the statement doesn't make sense, because a simulated brain could "simulate the heart" just by creating the qualia of having a heart, without having to also create an actual imitation heart to go along with the imitation brain.

The simulated “brain” that simulates the heart is a simulation of the brain and the heart. Frankly I don’t think anybody wants to be a brain in a box, so if this ever worked at all we would be simulating the brain and the body.

There’s no distinction between a simulation that creates a brain that thinks it has a body, and a simulation that actually has a body. The human consciousness depends on the entire nervous system.

The simulated “brain” that simulates the heart is a simulation of the brain and the heart.

This seems reasonable. And, again, going off this statement, it renders your original statement below completely wrong:

To have qualia you would have to simulate more than a brain, as qualia isn’t just felt or (in many cases) felt at all in the brain.

Because then we don't need to simulate more than the brain; we just need to simulate a brain which also simulates a heart (as in, the simulated brain creates the qualia of feeling a heart, without the programmers actually simulating a heart). So whether or not programmers simulated a brain AND a heart (AND a stomach and any other organ one might say is involved in qualia or feelings) really doesn't matter for the question of whether or not a simulated brain can have qualia. A simulated brain could just simulate those things.

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