In an ongoing argument with myself about what precisely humans are and how they are conscious I have been coming to some interesting ideas lately.

This whole argument goes back to the whole Mind/Body discussion. What parts of us denote our pure mechanical bodies and our true mindful selves? If we cut off a person’s arms and legs they will still maintain their minds and still be the same conscious identity. Put their brain in a jar and connect it up to a fake virtual world and they will still be themselves.

How much can you cut down a human being down to and still have a conscious, sentient entity?

We could say it is the brain, but what parts? A person can have a whole half of their brain removed and then still live, in some cases the remaining half adapting and taking up functions of the lost half.

I’ve been reading “Kinds of Minds” by Daniel Dennett and it goes on to describe “popperian creatures”:

Popperian creatures can preselect from possible behaviours / actions weeding out the truly stupid options before risking them in the harsh world. Dennett calls them Popperian because Popper said this design enhancement “permits our hypotheses to die in our stead”. This is Dennett’s enhancement of behaviourism. Popperian creatures have an inner environment that can preview and select amongst possible actions. For this to work the inner environment must contain lots of information about the outer environment and its regularities. Not only humans can do this. Mammals, birds, reptiles and fish can all presort behavioural options before acting.

– from Bill Kerr’s Blog

It’s got me thinking… we aren’t even our brains, we’re a simulation within our own brains.

The idea here is that intelligent entities try to come to good decisions by creating imagined versions of the world they see and imagining themselves within that simulated world. Here the imagined self can suffer all the slings and arrows of poor decisions before the real self does… but what if that imagined self living in these imagined worlds is the actual conscious entity?

In this light, we are like computer programs running in the hardware of the brain. It makes the concept of artificial intelligence and sentience more of a possibility.

Does this mean we can never really ever see the world as it really is? Perhaps we cannot, but remember that the imagined world we live in is based off of real events taking place outside and inside the body, and therefore these “imagined” stimuli are not any more “fake” than the “gas empty” light in your car. It is all based off of something genuinly happening in the real world.

This all makes the concept that simulated life and intelligence on a computer is real life and real intelligence… or at least as justifiably real as we are.

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