Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > Brent Meeker writes (quoting SP): > > >>> A lot of the stuff criticising Chalmer's thesis is quite strident, at least >>> by the usual >>> academic> > standards. It's not quite as severe as the reaction to Roger >>> Penrose's theories >>> on the mind, but> > almost. Many cognitive scientists seem to take anything >>> not clearly >>> straightforward materialism> > as automatically false or even nonsense. I >>> sympathise with >>> them to a degree: I think we should> > push materialism and reductionism as >>> far as we can. >>> But the inescapable fact remains, I could> > know every empirical fact >>> about a conscious >>> system, but still have no idea what it is actually> > like to *be* that >>> system, as it were >>> from the inside.> > That's commonly said, but is it really true? Even >>> without knowing >>> anything about another person's > brain you have a lot ideas about what it >>> is like to be that >>> person. Suppose you really knew a lot > about an artificial brain, as in a >>> planetary probe >>> for example, and you also knew a lot about your > own brain and to you >>> could compare >>> responses both at the behavioural level and at the "brain" level. > I >>> think you could infer >>> a lot about what it was like to be that probe. You just couldn't directly >>> > experience its >>> experiences - but that's not surprising. > > > You have an idea of what it is like to be another person because you are one > yourself. A > completely alien being might actually know more about how a human brain works > than any human, > even to the extent where he could manufacture a fully working and conscious > brain, but he would > not necessarily have any idea at all about what it is like to be a human > unless by accident his > own mind turned out to be similar to ours - and even then he couldn't be > sure.
That's simply an assumption. When we know how to make a conscious brain we may find that we do have a good idea of what it experiences - as evidenced by its self-reports and other behavoir. >On the other hand, > if you know every empirical fact about a non-conscious entity well enough to > make an exact > working replica, then you know everything there is to know about it. We could > define > consciousness as what is left over when you subtract what can be known about > an entity by an > external observer from what can be known by being that entity yourself. If there is anything left over. I don't think it is sufficiently appreciated that this "unknowability" is an assumption. Brent Meeker --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
