Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote: >>On Oct 11, 5:11 am, Brent Meeker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> >>>>But it isn't possible to determine by inspection that they are > > conscious.Are you claiming it's impossible in principle, or just that > >>>we don't know how? >> >>It may be impossible in principle (i.e. 1-person experience is >>ex-hypothesi incommunicable) and we certainly don't know how to. >> >>David >> > > > The fact that conscious experience is intrinsically privately > presented/delivered can be regarded as key evidence in any proposition as > to its physics. Any real solution must, by definition, explain why that is > so. > > Indeed if you imagine a world where consciousness is mundane they would > expect it to be so. If this possibility exists what it means is that the > attitude to scientific evidence has to change to suit the real world of > scientific evidence... especially if consciousness in the form of > observation by a scientist is to be demanded as the source of evidence on > pain of being declared unscientific (which is what we currently do - > unless you can eyeball it you're not being scientific). > > The subtlety with 'objective scientific evidence' is that ultimately it is > delivered into the private experiences of indiividual scientists. Only > agreement as to what is evidenced makes it 'objective'. So the privacy of > the experience individuals is and always will be an intrinsic and > unavoidable part of the whole process. > > If this is the case then there's a way around it - because in saying the > last sentence I have been implicitly assuming that a human is doing the > observing and therefore accepting tacitly all the limitations of that > circumstance. Relax that constraint and what do you get? Either another > biological life form is supplying evidence or a non-biological life-form > is giving evidence of consciousness somehow.
Why a "life form"? Why not an instrument or a robot? > > A non-biological life-form offers the only really flexible and fully > controllable and ethical option. How can this do the job, you ask? Isn't > this a circular arument? You have to know you;ve built a conscious life > form in oder that you get evidence to prove its consciousness? > > Not really... what it does is open up new options. In another world where > ethics are different you'd experiment by grafting scientist's heads > together so they could verify each other's experiences in some way. Plenty > of scientists! Why not?! ... erm...welll...not really gonna fly is it? Don't we "graft scientists heads together" now by speech, papers, symposia,... > So the viable alternative is 'grafting' putative artifiacts together in > 'cancellation bridges' Huh?? >of one form or another and configure them in such a > way as to report unambiguously the presence or absense of the results of > the physics of experience doing its stuff. Merge 4 artificial scientists > and get them to compare/contrast... and report.... So, for example, if we build a lot of different Mars rovers and they go to Mars and they report back similar things we'll have evidence that they are conscious? 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
