It's not preserving 'the original biological machinery in the original way' that is important, it may be about preserving a process that entails subjective experience.
It feels intuitive to me that the processes of certain kinds of systems feel like something from the perspective of the system and some don't. A purely indexical system (like a thermostat or an optimised 'follow the instructions of the earing' system) seems like the second type. Systems that intuitively don't seem like they'd have subjective experience.
I can't think of any way to test this, but it feels right that for a system to have subjective experience, or would have to:
Have more than a single goal or proximal goal
Process external and internal data differently
Is self-changed by the process
These are true for a person making decisions in life. They aren't true for an optimised 'follow the instructions of the earing' system no matter how accurately the instructions achieve the person's own original goals. I like that greg Egan short too, but I don't think the earing and the 'jewel' are the same because the jewel learns to copy the process of the person's thought, the earing (probably) doesn't.
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It's not preserving 'the original biological machinery in the original way' that is important, it may be about preserving a process that entails subjective experience.
It feels intuitive to me that the processes of certain kinds of systems feel like something from the perspective of the system and some don't. A purely indexical system (like a thermostat or an optimised 'follow the instructions of the earing' system) seems like the second type. Systems that intuitively don't seem like they'd have subjective experience.
I can't think of any way to test this, but it feels right that for a system to have subjective experience, or would have to:
These are true for a person making decisions in life. They aren't true for an optimised 'follow the instructions of the earing' system no matter how accurately the instructions achieve the person's own original goals. I like that greg Egan short too, but I don't think the earing and the 'jewel' are the same because the jewel learns to copy the process of the person's thought, the earing (probably) doesn't.
Just a feeling.
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