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Comment by thfuran | Hacker News Reader

>The magic would be in the CPU and there is no reason to believe the particular code for LaMDA has endowed it with consciousness. If the computer is conscious while running LaMDA it would be conscious while running any program

That seems entirely specious. Is a perfect simulation of a human run on a computer not conscious simply because a calculator program run on the same hardware wouldn't be?

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A perfect simulation of a human run on a computer would exist only in the minds of the people doing the simulation. On the computer it would be bits of data without any intrinsic meaning that is being processed like any other data. So no, I don't think it would be conscious unless a computer becomes conscious whenever it is running.

What if we gave it a robot body, with cameras and sensors? What if we made this robot body with biotechnology, so the only eletronic parts were the brain? And we didn't tell it that it was a robot. Will you be the one that will go tell them they are not concious? Please be careful, they will probably become very upset at you. People tend to do that.

That wouldn't change a thing. A simulation is not the thing being simulated, it is data being processed and people agreeing to interpret that data in a certain way. If somebody coded a perfect simulation of a fire their computer would not burn down.

If the computer didn't burn down then the simulation was not perfect.

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