Is behaviorism the right way to judge experience? Suppose you simply recorded the outcome of the sleeping beauty problem for a computer X, and then replayed the scenario a few times using the cached choice of X instead of actually running X again each time. For that matter, suppose you just accurately predict what X will conclude and never actually run X at all. Does X experience the same thing the same number of times in all these instances? I don’t see a behavioral difference between running two thin computers layered on top of each other and using one thin computer and one cached/predicted result.
Another way to ask this is how thin can you slice the computer before it stops having experience? From a behaviorism perspective you can thin it all the way down to just a cached/predicted responses.
If we can’t differentiate between how much experience a computer has when it’s running thin or thick, then that implies we can’t truly measure how much experience a computer has at different times or places. It’s just an assumption that a computer now and a computer 5 minutes from now have the same measure of experience, but I don’t see a way to test that assumption.
Is behaviorism the right way to judge experience? Suppose you simply recorded the outcome of the sleeping beauty problem for a computer X, and then replayed the scenario a few times using the cached choice of X instead of actually running X again each time. For that matter, suppose you just accurately predict what X will conclude and never actually run X at all. Does X experience the same thing the same number of times in all these instances? I don’t see a behavioral difference between running two thin computers layered on top of each other and using one thin computer and one cached/predicted result.
Another way to ask this is how thin can you slice the computer before it stops having experience? From a behaviorism perspective you can thin it all the way down to just a cached/predicted responses.
If we can’t differentiate between how much experience a computer has when it’s running thin or thick, then that implies we can’t truly measure how much experience a computer has at different times or places. It’s just an assumption that a computer now and a computer 5 minutes from now have the same measure of experience, but I don’t see a way to test that assumption.