I guess my concern is this: why are so many people so obsessed with the idea that their touchy-feely experiences aren’t caused by some interesting biophysics? What’s with the dogmatic insistence that it’s all algorithmic? Why is it so critically important that we suddenly ignore the distinction between how you *act* and how you *feel*, when that distinction is paramount in our day-to-day lives? Why only ask the questions that you’re already prepared to answer, and shrug off all of the other deep questions?

Maybe the trend will take the long way around, finding its way back to Terran air travel from the space tourism industry.

Second, what sort of materials in these things could help the perception of cleanliness in these? Current airlines have firm deodorized cushions with, often, slightly protected headrests, and people are generally fully dressed on flights, so basically hair-funk from a previous passenger is themost likely thing one would have to deal with, and it is mostly dealt with before you get there.

But how would it feel to be the third person that day to enter a horizontal capsule where someone’s face was? Where their infant was crawling all over, or where a diaper was changed?

Also, how does the snack service work? Do you have room to sit up to eat your meal?

The last line continues: “it does something very different from what I try to do. I try to reason out some sort of pathway to a solution that looks elegant, perhaps by noticing that 999,999 is divisible by 231, hence 10^30 = (10^6)^5 is equal to 1 modulo 231, and perhaps I can figure out the remainder from there, given that 231 and 233 are only two apart. There is a contest and struggle and ideas are flowing and the like. Computers have a set algorithm burned into their silicon chips for doing these moduluses.

We might both arrive at the same conclusion, and you could even teach me to do this modulus operation myself, I’m sure. But at the lowest level, I don’t think of that modulus operation as a *conscious* problem-solving technique; I just view it as some sort of symbol-shuffling of ones and zeroes through logic gates. But, says Searle, *all* computation is *defined* as symbol-shuffling.

I mean, obviously, conscious things can do symbol shuffling — we can presumably just do 30-digit long division with 10^30 and 233 to get the remainder we seek. But it’s not something to mistake with our actual conscious experience. When presented with a Turing-test-passing computer and asked, “is it conscious?”, to Searle, the proper response is “I don’t know — I don’t know what exactly makes biological systems conscious. I mean, I know that I *am*, and I can reason about biological systems like mine — cats and dogs and humans and so forth — but I can’t extend that to silicon at all. Could you show me the internals of the silicon, so that I could see whether it’s doing something novel and touchy-feely? Possibly, could you show me the internals of myself, so that I could see how my brain creates these touchy-feely states in the first place?”

Anyway, to get to why I’m here: I was reading Democritus lecture 4 again, as one does, and I was puzzled when you said that AI skeptic arguments can be converted to arguments involving brains as well.

I think if we recontextualize Searle, then this problem disappears, at least in his case. (I haven’t read much Penrose.)

Searle doesn’t think of consciousness as something you *do* — I mean: of course at the lowest level the brain does consciousness, according to Searle — but rather, consciousness is something which you *have*, which you can take for granted. So, you pinch me, and I don’t just *behave* in a certain way, like recoil and say ‘ouch’, but I also *feel* a certain way: some *pain* shoots through my subjective impression of myself.

Far from being some side-fact to our consciousness, it occurs to you that this is the meat-and-potatoes of our own personal conscious experience. It’s not the *reaction* to the stimulus that makes us know we’re conscious; if we had been drugged so that our bodies wouldn’t move in response (something like what our bodies do every night as we sleep) we would still think of ourselves as having a conscious episode.

Well, if consciousness is something we really have, then we have Searle at his most fundamental: you really do feel that pain, and there is some subjective first-person experience there, and you wonder “okay, what the heck is the brain doing to create these darn touchy-feely experiences that are our consciousness?”

The Turing test leaves us utterly hanging on this question, because it focuses on your reaction to the pain: it doesn’t even try to analyse the underlying feeling of pain that you’ve got. This is what Searle tried to express in his Chinese-room argument, although most people who disagree with him take the Chinese-room argument rather facetiously. (Which, for the record, I think is a problem with the argument.)

If it helps, Searle provides the following argument parallel to his Chinese-room argument in other sources; it goes as follows: we know people can *act* like they’re pained even when they don’t have the touchy-feely pain experience; so we know that pain-behaviour is not actually sufficient for pain-feeling. But we know that you can also suppress a pain and not show outward signs of it, even though you feel it: especially for militants from SPARTAAA! and the like. So it also isn’t sufficient to

You are correct to highlight the problem of other minds: we know other people are conscious, but its not like we ever feel what *they* feel; we aren’t telepathic, so we can’t immediately feel someone else’s conscious states. To Searle, this was a huge problem to dualisms, and it’s one big reason why he’s not one. Searle wants to say: “listen, when a brain is normally functioning, it has these touchy-feely impressions; that’s just part of what the brain does. How? I don’t know — but we each know in our own case that it does it. It is through knowing *how brains react to pain*, at least in our own case, that we immediately step back and infer that you feel a pain when I pinch you. It’s through understanding something about the causal structure of the brain that we say, ‘look, you have the same causal structure! I bet these material effects cause a pain in you!’ and so forth.” (not a direct quote, naturally.)

When silicon does something like compute the remainder of 10^30 modulo 233,

http://www.emirates.com/english/flying/cabin_features/first_class/new_private_suites.aspx

http://qwiki.stanford.edu/wiki/Complexity_Zoo:P#php

which is PhP, the class of problems tractable on physically realizeable computers. It says that BPP is in PhP but that it’s debatable whether BQP is in PhP.

But, why is anyone so sure that BPP is in PhP? That seems to make a rather strong assumption that we are able to generate true random numbers with physical processes. There is really no way to test this. If X is a random-looking bit string, then the proposition “X is Kolmogorov-random” is, in general, logically undecidable.