The point is that it doesn't really make sense to say they're "seeing" anything. You said

  So… are the neurons on that chip seeing?

  We all desperately want to say no.

But I can confidently say "no, that's totally childish, the neurons are clearly not seeing anything." And in fact it's not even especially clear that they're "playing DOOM" vs. hitting a biased random number generator in response to carefully preprocessed inputs that come from DOOM. There is a major distinction when the enemy positions are directly piped into the brain.

Again I share the ethical concern about this stuff. But your blog post is quite misleading.

Have to say. I kind of agree with both of you.

But 'seeing' in humans is also a bit manipulated.

Does it really matter to the argument if it is seeing 'red', or just that it is 'sensing input'.

Suppose someone builds a framework that maps Doom to a large succession of Tic-Tac-Toe games.

Would the person tasked with placing X and O marks still be "playing Doom"?

you don't have to imagine too far - I made DOOM run through a series of pre-rendered images in markdown files as a stateless engine before [0] and the answer to your question is highly upto interpretation

You move, you plan, your actions have outcomes Same question as if you're playing choose-your-own-adventure game storybook

0 - https://github.com/Kuberwastaken/backdooms