On Aug 11, 1:14 am, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 8/10/2011 8:20 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: > > > Hi Stathis, > > > Exactly how would we know that that component was unconscious? > > What is the test? > > > Onward! > > > Stephen > > Your just confusing things. It's a hypothetical. Craig holds that only > organic kinds of things can be conscious, so hypothetically one could > make a functionally identical (input/output) component that was not > conscious.
Not exactly. I'm saying that what we mean by conscious is a special case of biological awareness. It's not that something inorganic cannot be 'conscious' in another way, it's that it won't feel like we feel because it has never lived as an animal. A computer made of silicon can reproduce i/o to some extent, just as a telephone can reproduce human i/o to some extent, but our ability to infer a human presence behind a voice on a telephone or a program running a chip is just our inference. This is what sensory awareness does - it's a kind of ventriloquism in reverse, jumping the gaps between protocol junctions to try infer sensible characteristics about the source. Conscious cannot meaningfully be described as a binary distinction from non-conscious in this context. It's a qualitative range. I'm saying that you need R, G, and B pixels on a monitor to get the color image of human consciousness and that inorganic matter appears to only be able to provide blue pixels. Yes, you can watch a program in blue pixels only, but it's not the same thing as full color, regardless of how many pixels and how fine a resolution there is. You cannot make a single red pixel out of blue. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
