Negative atheism? Universal consciousness (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, January 01, 2015, 21:21 (3613 days ago) @ David Turell

A computer scientist discusses whether computer can ever be conscious and his belief that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe:-"I think consciousness, like mass, is a fundamental property of the universe. The analogy, and it's a very good one, is that you can make pretty good weather predictions these days. You can predict the inside of a storm. But it's never wet inside the computer. You can simulate a black hole in a computer, but space-time will not be bent. Simulating something is not the real thing.-"It's the same thing with consciousness. In 100 years, you might be able to simulate consciousness on a computer. But it won't experience anything. Nada. It will be black inside. It will have no experience whatsoever, even though it may have our intelligence and our ability to speak.-"I am not saying consciousness is a magic soul. It is something physical. Consciousness is always supervening onto the physical. But it takes a particular type of hardware to instantiate it. A computer made up of transistors, moving charge on and off a gate, with each gate being connected to a small number of other gates, is just a very different cause-and-effect structure than what we have in the brain, where you have one neuron connected to 10,000 input neurons and projecting to 10,000 other neurons. But if you were to build the computer in the appropriate way, like a neuromorphic computer [see “Thinking in Silicon”], it could be conscious."-http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531146/what-it-will-take-for-computers-to-be-conscious/