On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]
<mailto:[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.
But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be
possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented
consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's
body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more.
And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's
consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and
of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a
Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have
and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,"I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself
and where I fit in the world". The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social
- but a dog might.
Brent
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