On 07 Sep 2011, at 20:39, meekerdb wrote:
On 9/7/2011 7:36 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
But what is the threshold at which a reconstituted person feels
anything at all?
It does not exist. The person always feel something. I guess you
ask what is the threshold for such machine to manifest genuinely
the phenomenon of feeling something? Here comp gives a clear
answer: we cannot have such criterion. We can have plausibility
criteria, and that is what we use in the everyday life. But such
everyday-life suggests we will always meet difficulties to decide
if some entity is conscious or not. In case of lower animals,
plants, and tomorrow's machines, some people will argue that they
don't feel, like some people argues that some higher animals or
even some humans does not feel, or not sufficiently to be
considered as a genuine person (like with some form of coma).
Thus the "hard problem" will be bypassed and "being conscious" will
be regarded as a certain kind of behavior which is within the
purview of artificial intelligence engineering.
Not at all. Why would the impossibility of a 3-threshold (to decide if
something is conscious) imply that we have to bypass the hard problem?
On the contrary, such a theoretical impossibility is one step toward
the solution. We will just *have to* bypass the threshold criteria,
and keep the theory which explains why we have to bypass the criteria.
That might just be a nucance from the point of view of engineering,
but is a key point for the fundamental inquiry.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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