On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: >> Without the axiom that intelligent behavior implies consciousness it >> would be entirely reasonable to conclude that you are the only conscious >> being in the universe. >> > >> > > Now we're getting to the heart of it.
Yes. > That axiom is a religious belief. Call it any bad name you like but the fact is that both you and I have been measuring consciousness by intelligent behavior every minute of every hour of our waking life from the moment we were born. Any logical system must start with unproven axioms and the fewer and the simpler the better, and I can't think of a better axiom to start with than that one. > Unlike other scientific axioms, it doesn't help us in building new > gadgets, True. > > so not even useful False, at least for me. I find it very useful indeed because I could not function if I thought I was the only conscious being in the universe and, provided that you really are conscious, I doubt if you could either. > I might very well suspect the computer is conscious, but I wouldn't claim > to be sure Do you know for sure that I am conscious? For that matter all you know about me is the ASCII sequences I have produced, so do you even know for sure that I'm not a computer? 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.
