On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]>wrote: > > >>> I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. >>>> >>> >>> > Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? >>> >> >> > Yes (weakly). >> > > You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance > that you are the only conscious being in the universe? > I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. > By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping > or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they > don't behave very intelligently. > But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. > > > Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some >> mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) >> and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all >> human beings have a mind, >> > > OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must > also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because > Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so > cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. > Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is > conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. > You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. > > > > although I know I will never be able to prove it. >> > > I agree on that point. > > John K Clark > > > > > > > >> >> >> -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
