The Future of the Human Race.

[Dent]

I haven't mentioned the phrase digital zombie, how would you prefer I refer to something that isn't capable of experience?
"devalue the concept of future "sentient" beings." I am?
edit :this is a zombie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
a digital zombie is that in a computer.

I'll paste what I linked to earlier and bold the bits that are interesting

2.1 Software-Based Minds or Anthropomorphic Projections?
...And in any case, runs this argument, biological minds are physically made up from the same matter and energy as digital computers. So conscious mind can't be dependent on some mysterious special substrate, even if consciousness could actually do anything. To suppose otherwise harks back to a pre-scientific vitalism.

Yet consciousness does, somehow, cause us to ask questions about its existence, its millions of diverse textures ("qualia"), and their combinatorial binding. So the alternative conjecture canvassed here is that the nature of our unitary conscious minds is tied to the quantum-mechanical properties of reality itself, Hawking's "fire in the equations that makes there a world for us to describe". On this conjecture, the intrinsic, "program-resistant" subjective properties of matter and energy, as disclosed by our unitary phenomenal minds and the phenomenal world-simulations we instantiate, are the unfakeable signature of basement reality. "Raw feels", by their very nature, cannot be mere abstractra. There could be no such chimerical beast as a "virtual" quale, let alone full-blown virtual minds made up of abstract qualia. Unitary phenomenal minds cannot subsist as mere layers of computational abstraction. Or rather if they were to do so, then we would be confronted with a mysterious Explanatory Gap, analogous to the explanatory gap that would open up if the population of China suddenly ceased to be an interconnected aggregate of skull-bound minds, and was miraculously transformed into a unitary subject of experience - or a magic genie. Such an unexplained eruption into the natural world would be strong ontological emergence with a vengeance - and inconsistent with any prospect of a reductive physicalism. To describe the existence of conscious mind as posing a Hard Problem for materialists and evangelists of software-based digital minds is like saying fossils pose a Hard Problem for the Creationist, i.e. true enough, but scarcely an adequate reflection of the magnitude of the challenge.

I think the mainstream view involves strong emergence, the "ghost in the machine" being complexity.
I really don't like it, emergence makes no sense to me. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsyc...on-emergentism)

Unlike reductive physicalism, which i'm used to.
"Reductive physicalism: all high-level macroscopic phenomena must be explicable ultimately in terms of fundamental physics [molecular biology reduces to chemistry and chemistry ultimately to quantum field theory [or maybe M-theory - we shall see.]"


So if you agree with this dude i'd like to know if you think that if the population of China the USA or whoever arranged themselves in a certain way they would become a unitary subject of experience? Maybe you just need one more person arranged in a special position?

Posted this paper in singularity but for reference
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz...ous-130208.pdf
If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious

How do you get consciousness from materialism?
"Materialism: the fundamental "stuff" of the world is non-conscious"