[whswhs]

Originally Posted by malloyd

I think that last is probably a step too far.

All of your senses are virtual doesn't seem like it disqualifies you from being conscious. And in fact is still perception of something in the physical world - yeah your consciousness *interprets* a physical pattern of voltages on the input pins of your chip in a decidedly different way than a human would, but it's still external physical stimulus being turned into mental model of the world. Possibly a very wrong model, but still.

I think that's a problematic extension of the term "perception."

First, a terminological note: You say that consciousness "interprets" something. Consciousness is not an entity or a physical subsystem within an entity; it doesn't have agency. It's the brain, or the organism, or the computer, that interprets things.

Now, if you say that any process in which stimulation of a physical system results in its forming a model of a world is "perception," that seems to include, for example, the classic brain in a box with electrodes, or the person trapped in the Matrix, or the person victimized by Descartes' "evil genius." In other words, it includes a wide range of the classic skeptical scenarios for perception being completely misleading and untrustworthy, in effect no different from hallucination. And if those are the case, then skeptical conclusions seem to follow from them: You cannot claim to know anything, not even that there are external physical stimuli.

The key here is your comment "perhaps a very wrong model." A process that can just as well create a very wrong model as a right one isn't perception.

A subordinate point is that you describe the computer as "perceiving" the voltages on various input pins. That seems exactly like saying that I "perceive" the firing of my retinal neurons. And that's a misleading way to describe it. I perceive a monitor screen with a big yellow patch, a smaller white patch, and some black shapes spread across the white patch; I interpret those shapes as words; but my retinal impulses are not what I perceive, but (part of) how I perceive. I don't say "Oh, I'm getting a frequency of X on this neuron's firing, and a frequency of Y on this one's," and so on for some vast number of neurons, and then deduce that they form a certain image; rather, I say "that's a monitor screen showing such and such." Indeed, taking it the other way, supposing that what we "perceive" is the internal electrical states of our brains, is another path to skeptical conclusions.

For comparison, if I put a thermometer into a roast game hen that I've taken out of the oven, what the thermometer is measuring is the internal temperature of the game hen; it's not measuring a voltage in a wire, though there is such a voltage and it forms part of the process that results in the measurement. And "perceive" is like "measure": It describes an action toward the physical world.