On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 6:11 PM, Ben Goertzel <[email protected]> wrote: > I tend to agree with Imre Lakatos that old points of view are almost never > proven false; they > are just demonstrated to be relatively uninteresting ways of interpreting > observations and so > they fall by the wayside. I guess your "subjective experience is an > illusion" paradigm will > definitively fall into that category once we can do experiments such as I'm > describing here...
The old point of view is that we have souls that go to heaven. Has anyone proven this false? When I first heard of Skinner's behaviorism, I immediately rejected the idea as so obviously wrong that I would not even consider it. It is so utterly obvious that we have conscious experience that cannot be explained by computation with neurons, right? The idea that we have a physical brain and a non-physical soul or consciousness perceiving and doing exactly the same things in lockstep is called dualism. Has anyone ever disproved dualism? Does any of this matter for AGI design? You build a computer that duplicates everything the brain does. It passes the Turing test. You put it in a robot and to everyone it looks and behaves just like a human. Is it conscious? How are you going to answer that? You can't even say what the question means. Sure, you could toss out 10% or 90% or 100% of your brain and put the AGI brain in its place and at every step you would say you are conscious and don't feel any different than you did before. What does that prove? You already proved to your own satisfaction that you are conscious, right? -- -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
