On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>  was the Email message that you sent to the Everything list on Sunday
>> Sep 23, 2012 at 9:13 AM on the east coast of the USA with the title
>> "Re:Zombieopolis Thought Experiment" unique?
>>
>
> > My experience of sending it was unique. The experiences of people
> reading what I wrote were unique.
>

That's all very nice but it doesn't answer my question, was the Email
message that you sent to the Everything list on Sunday September 23, 2012
at 9:13 AM on the east coast of the USA with the title "Re:Zombieopolis
Thought Experiment" unique?

> The existence of an email message is only inferred through our experiences
>

Obviously.

> there is no email message outside of human interpretation.
>

Thus the moon does not exist when you are not looking at it.

> Without sense to be informed, organization is just a hypothetical
> morphology containing no possibilities of interest.
>

Translation from the original bafflegab: without information information
would contain nothing informative. I could not agree more.

> With sense, you don't need information, you just need to be able to make
> sense of forms locally in some way.
>

You made enough sense out of my message to respond to it and you only
received that sense impression because it was sent over a wire, and if it
can be sent over a wire then its information.

> Yes, scientific method can find no evidence of consciousness of any kind.
>

The thing I don't understand is why this is supposed to be a problem only
for those who think a intelligent computer is conscious and is supposed to
be no problem for those who think that other intelligent humans are
conscious.

> If you think that means that consciousness has to be impossible, then
> again, that is your projection.
>

You and I have both believed that consciousness exists since we were both
infants and we both have been implicitly using the exact same theory to
determine when something is conscious and when something is not, and that
is that intelligent behavior indicates consciousness. In fact you don't
even believe that you yourself are conscious when you don't behave in a
complex intelligent manner, such as when you are in a dreamless sleep or
under anesthesia, and that's why you and I fear death, when we eventually
get in that state we won't be acting any smarter than a rock and as a
result we fear that we will be no more conscious than a rock. What I object
to is that when we run across a intelligent computer the rules of the game
are supposed to suddenly change, and that just doesn't seem very smart.

> you define science as the objective study of the behavior of objects,
>

No, I define science as the use of the scientific method, and that means
looking at the evidence and developing a theory to explain it, NOT finding
a theory that makes you feel good and then looking for evidence that
supports it and ignoring evidence that refutes it. As illustrated in our
debate on the free will noise you were even willing to embrace flat out
logical contradictions if that's what it took for you to continue to
believe what you found pleasant to believe, like X is not Y and X is also
not not Y.  Using such procedures may be successful in inducing a pleasing
stupor but you'll have to abandon any hope of finding things that are true.

> then you cannot be surprised when science cannot locate what it is
> explicitly defined to disqualify.
>

I'm not surprised and all I ask is that whatever method you use for
determining the existence of consciousness, scientific or otherwise, you
don't suddenly change the rules in the middle of the race just because you
saw a intelligent computer. Use whatever test you want to infer
consciousness, all I'm asking for is consistency.

> I don't understand how this isn't blindingly obvious, but I must accept
> that it is like gender orientation or political bias - not something that
> can be addressed by reason.
>

At one time it was blindingly obvious that human beings with a black skin
didn't have the same sort of feelings as people with white skin do, even
though they acted as if they did, that's how they convinced themselves that
there was nothing wrong with slavery.

> If you try to live off of electronics then you will not survive. I have
> now shown that at a fundamental level, biology, in the form of food,
> respiration, hydration, etc, has something that electronics lack.
>

So the key to consciousness is that humans eat breathe drink and shit but
computer's don't. Hmm, I don't quite see the connection, however I do know
that both biology and electronics are involved with quantum tunneling, the
Schrodinger Equation, and the Pauli Exclusion Principle but electronics
also has things that biology lacks, things like Bloch lattice functions,
semiconductor valence bands, and the Hall effect; I don't understand why
those functions have nothing to do with consciousness but defecation is
intimately related with consciousness.

I also don't understand why the computer counterpart of Craig Weinberg
couldn't make the argument that Human beings can behave intelligently but
they can never be conscious because they don't have p-n silicon junctions,
after all the link between p-n silicon junctions and consciousness is every
bit as strong as the link between digestion and consciousness. For that
matter I don't understand why the biological Craig Weinberg doesn't make
the argument that biological women can't be conscious because they don't
have testicles.

> When we have electronics that can be used as meal replacements, then I
> will consider the possibility that such an advancement in electronics might
> have additional capacities.
>

So you're only conscious when you eat.

John K Clark

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