The story went off the rails for me when "Zach" said he couldn't hear himself nor feel himself move. Even in the midst of the most severe sensory deprivation, I continue to perceive "noise" in my sensory system: tinnitus, breathing, heartbeat, sub-resolution sparkles in my visual system (just close your eyes and pay attention), kinaesthetic sensations of enormous number and variety. As long as you're going to recreate memories indistinguishable from reality, you'll further need to create sensory input indistinguishable from reality. At which point you've simulated the entire encounterable universe and you indeed have something that I would call intelligent, despite its lack of carbon components in the mental mechanism. Each component technology might be interesting for its own sake, but aside from the philosophical point, what's the use? The carbon based versions are plentiful, and the construction process...
It's a thought experiment. It's not impossible to imagine a perfected sensory deprivation tank where you do not hear yourself move or breathe. The other stimuli are, from what I understand, hallucinations, and as such are irrelevant to the experiment.
> As long as you're going to recreate memories indistinguishable from reality, you'll further need to create sensory input indistinguishable from reality. At which point you've simulated the entire encounterable universe
Not really, after all you only need to simulate the universe at the human level of the perception, which means you can ignore most of the computational complexity of simulating the actual universe.
>Each component technology might be interesting for its own sake, but aside from the philosophical point, what's the use? The carbon based versions are plentiful, and the construction process...
The cabron based forms are not very durable (80 years ? c'mon), they break easily, and don't perform very well...
> The carbon based forms are not very durable (80 years ? c'mon), they break easily, and don't perform very well...
Actually it's hard to build machines to last that long (how many 1932 cars are still functional today?)
The real advantage of the machines is that you can switch them off, open them up, replace parts, re-assemble them and switch them on again. You can replace parts of carbon-based lifeforms, but they don't always switch on again and opening them up often results in them being eaten by other carbon-based lifeforms. It's not cheap to do this to old machines, but its fairly reliable.
