On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com>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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
