• turdas@suppo.fi
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    9 days ago

    Maybe, maybe not. It’s possible that thoughts or consciousness have some minimum processing rate before they emerge. It’s possible the computing substrate matters. We don’t know.

    However, in your example I think it would be safe to say that it could at least not be a hosted virtual consciousness because no human is capable of holding the entire state of the neural network in their mind.

    Highly abstract thought experiments like this aren’t terribly useful here, because we’re dealing with some kind of (possibly emergent) property of the universe rather than an abstract concept that can be cleanly defined using logic. Physics has shown that the universe is quite messy and not easily described using logic and maths. Thought experiments of classical philosophy fare remarkably poorly when they encounter physics.