"Jesse Mazer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> helpfully wrote: > ... it's useful to differentiate between 3 different positions: > > 1. Consciousness is not "real"--our decision to call a system > "conscious" or not is based only on subjective aesthetic criteria, > like "cuteness" (Daniel Dennett's example). The only facts about > reality are third-person facts, in this view. > > 2. Consciousness is real, but the feeling of continuity of > consciousness over time (the 'flow of related thoughts in time' above) > is not. In this view, only moments of experience exist, but nothing > flows between these moments. > > 3. Consciousness is real, and so is continuity of consciousness over > time. Proponents of this view may still believe that identity can > split or merge though (think of many-worlds, or replicator > experiments). > > ....
Despite its unpopularity, I think position 1 makes the most sense for those of us expecting to someday build robots that are also persons. Building robots is, after all, a third person kind of activity. But position 1 does NOT preclude the reality of a first-person existence, it just makes that existence a purely subjective matter, but not only for third persons. Once you attribute consciousness to an entity (perhaps persuaded by its Turing test performance), then you are interpreting its observable state in terms of feelings, beliefs and intentions. Among those feelings and beliefs, presumably, is the entity's feeling of and belief in its own consciousness, i.e. its awareness of its own existence. So, this awareness exists not only as a subjective attribute in your mind, but (within that attribution) as a subjective attribute in the entity's own mind. Why shouldn't the entity's subjective self-perception count as real experience? It has at least as much Platonic existence as any of the proposed frameworks for universe existence on this list: more so, since the entity's consciousness can be explored in depth very naturally by conducting a long personal relationship with it.