Kory Heath wrote: > > On Nov 9, 2008, at 9:56 AM, Brent Meeker wrote: >> It's sort of what I meant; except I imagined a kind of robot that, >> like your >> Turing test program, had it's behavior run by a random number >> generator but just >> happened to behave as if it were conscious. > > Ok. That works just as well for me. > >> I'm not sure where you would draw >> the line between the accidentally convincing conversation and the >> accidentally >> behaving robot to say one was a philosophical zombie and the other >> wasn't. > > I wouldn't. I would say that neither of them are philosophical zombies > at all. And I'm pretty sure that that would be Dennett's position. > >> Since the concept is just a hypothetical it's a question of semantics. > > I agree. But the semantics are important when it comes to > communicating with other philosophers. My only point at the beginning > of this thread was that Bruno would be getting himself into hot water > with other philosophers by claiming that unimplemented computations > describing conscious beings should count as zombies, because that's a > misuse of the established term. > >> OK. It's just that the usual definition in strictly in terms of >> behavior and >> doesn't consider inner workings. > > But the inner workings are part of the behavior, and I'm pretty sure > that the usual definition of "philosophical zombie" includes these > inner workings. > >> My own view is that someday we will understand a lot about the inner >> workings of >> brains; enough that we can tell what someone is thinking by >> monitoring the >> firing of neurons and that we will be able to build robots that >> really do >> exhibit conscious behavior (although see John McCarthy's website for >> why we >> shouldn't do this). When we've reached this state of knowledge, >> questions about >> qualia and what is consciousness will be seen to be the wrong >> questions. They >> will be like asking where is life located in an animal. > > As far as I understand it, this is exactly Dennett's position. > > Let's imagine we know enough about the inner working of brains to > examine a brain and tell what that person is thinking, feeling, etc. > Imagine that we certainly know enough to examine a brain and confirm > that it is *not* just a random-number generator that's accidentally > seeming to be conscious. We can look at a brain and tell that it > really is responding to the words that are being spoken to it, etc. > Let's say that we actually do examine some particular brain, and > confirm that it's meeting all of our physical criteria of > consciousness. Do you think it's logically possible for that brain to > *not* be conscious? If you don't believe that, then you, like Dennett > (and me), don't believe in the logical possibility of zombies.
I'm with you and Dennett - except I'm reserved about the use of "logical possibility". I don't think logic makes anything impossible except "A and ~A"; which is a failure of expression. So I tend to just say "impossible" or sometimes "nomologically impossible". Brent --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
