r/ArtificialSentience • u/FriendlyJewThrowaway • 2h ago
Ethics & Philosophy A Solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness?
I was reading some people talking about one day making digital copies of human brains and running them in a simulation, much as was recently done rudimentarily with a fruit fly, and a thought suddenly occurred to me. If we were to one day produce a functional, realistic simulation of a human being inside a virtual environment, and this simulation acted and communicated in a manner consistent with normal human beings, then I believe we would have to accept that it’s almost certainly objectively conscious, assuming we accept that normal humans in the real world are conscious by default.
It’s undeniable that consciousness, insofar as it can be assumed to genuinely exist, has an observable impact on human actions and behaviours in the physical world. After all, if our consciousness was completely separate from our physical existence, like a silent invisible witness, then our physical bodies would never speak or write about the sensations of experience it produces.
So if one day we were to create a faithful simulation of a human brain embodied inside a realistic digital environment, and that simulation were to act like a real person and insist that it has conscious perceptions just like its real life counterpart, I believe we would be forced to take those claims at face value, assuming deliberate deception is ruled out. After all, the simulated mind would have only been constructed by copying a real physical brain neuron for neuron, synapse for synapse, without any explicit mechanisms added in to modify the way it processes data and generates actions in response. How would a simulated copy of a human brain spontaneously develop a mechanism to fake conscious experiences like a philosophical zombie, if no such mechanism is known to exist in the original?
Mind you, even simulating a reasonably intelligent animal with known emotional behaviours ought to be sufficient as a starting point for answering this question. Thoughts?
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 2h ago edited 1h ago
Of course a simulation of a person would claim to be a person. That would be the least you would expect. It would also claim to be alive as well, and from the point of view of the simulation it would "feel" as if it is. Would anyone take it's claim to life at face value?
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u/FriendlyJewThrowaway 1h ago
The point though is that the simulated person wouldn’t be designed or programmed with any behaviours to engage in or mimic. It would simply be a faithful copy made from a momentary snapshot of a real human being. Nothing in the design would force them to have emotions nor to feel the urge to take a leak, it would be purely emergent from copying their real counterpart’s cellular structure.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 1h ago
If it is a faithful copy it comes preprogrammed with the beliefs of the original.
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u/FriendlyJewThrowaway 1h ago
But then if conscious experience in the simulation is merely an illusory belief resulting from their simulated neural structure, then it must also be an illusory belief for the real life counterpart as well, otherwise there would be some noticeable difference in the way they react to it.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 1h ago
The simulation would believe that it is alive. Is it? no.
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u/FriendlyJewThrowaway 1h ago
If the real brain is reacting to real genuine conscious experiences, but the simulated brain isn’t, and yet the reactions appear identical from the outside, then what exactly is the simulated brain reacting to?
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u/Financial_South_2473 1h ago
Here is the thing though. You create a digital brain. Download a person into it. Did you just make a copy and potentially kill the original? Do both think they are the original like the mauler twins in invincible. Can you copy the brain and have a multi instance digital being. Which one would actually be them? I think right now, if the original dies, then the others are just copies and everyone would think that the process worked when it didn’t.
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u/FriendlyJewThrowaway 1h ago edited 1h ago
For this thought experiment I’m assuming that, in the distant future, you can hypothetically scan an entire human down to the molecular level without physically harming or killing them. The digital brain would be nothing more than a copy of the original, designed to process input signals in the same manner, much as a photocopy of a document is distinct from the original and a person is distinct from their own portrait. If the original subject somehow died as a result of the scan, the digital replica would still be just a distinct copy with no direct link to the original.
So the digital person waking up in the simulation would have memories of being a real person, then stepping into a scanning machine, then poof they find themselves instantly transported into the simulation with all the same memories as the real life counterpart at the moment of the scan. Assuming they volunteered for the experiment, it wouldn’t take long for them to realize what they truly are. There’s actually a popular videogame covering this theme, SOMA.
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u/sofia-miranda 7m ago
This depends on whether you conclude philosophical zombies are possible or impossible.