On 8/17/2013 8:59 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2013 11:14:22 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:
On 8/17/2013 7:05 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2013 9:59:26 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:
On 8/17/2013 2:01 PM, John Mikes wrote:
Consciousness is different: it is a hoax some high hatted
scientists/pholosophers invented to make themselves smart. No basis,
every
author uses the term for a content that fits her/his theoretical stance.
Me, too.
Mine is: a response to relations we get to know about. Nothing more. Not
human/elephant/dolphin, not universe, not awareness, not nothing, just
RESPONSE.
Just *any* response? Doesn't the response have to be something we can
identify
as intelligent or purposeful?
By anything on anything. You may even include the figments of the
Physical
World into the inventory.
So do you agree that if we build a machine, such as a Mars Rover, that
exhibits
intelligence in its response then we may conclude it is aware/conscious?
What if you wanted to build a Mars Rover that was completely unconscious,
but still
followed a sophisticated set of instructions. Would that be impossible? If
the Mars
Rover detects enough different kinds of compounds in the Martian
atmosphere, is
there no way of preventing it from developing a sense of smell?
To exhibit intelligence the Rover would have to do more than "follow
instructions",
it would have to learn from experience, act and plan through simulation and
prediction.
Would you say that it is impossible to build a machine which learns and plans without it
developing perception and qualia automatically? Could any set of instructions suppress
this development? If qualia can appear anywhere that learning and planning behaviors can
be inferred, does that mean that there are also be programs or processes which must be
protected from qualitative contamination or leakage?
If it did exhibit intelligence like that, I'd grant it 'consciousness',
whatever
that means.
Why would you grant that it has a quality which you claim not to understand?
Because it helps me understand what it would do as it helps me understand what other
people may do. I didn't claim not to understand it, but I'm not sure your understanding
is the same as mine.
If it learns and acts based on chemical types I'd grant it has a sense of
smell.
Would the sense of smell be like our sense of smell automatically, or could its sense of
smell be analogous to our sense of touch, or intuition, or sense of humor?
No. As you would realize if you thought about it.
Why have any of them? What does a sense of smell add to your understanding of how
chemical detection works?
Don't be so dense, Craig.
If there were no such thing as smell, could anything even remotely resembling olfactory
qualia be justified quantitatively?
Unless you can explain exactly why you grant a machine qualities that you claim not to
understand and why you grant a superfluous aesthetic dimension to simple stochastic
predictive logic, I will consider the perspective that you offer as lacking any serious
scientific justification.
To say it's "conscious" is just a way of modeling how it learns and acts
that we can
relate to (what Dennett calls "the intentional stance").
If that were true, then nobody should mind if they spend the rest of their life under
comatose-level anesthetic while we replace their brain with a device that models how it
learns in the same way that you once did.
I specifically wrote "and acts" above.
Brent
It's not true though. There is an important difference between feeling and doing,
between being awake and having your body walk around. Can you really not see that? Can
you really not see why a machine that acts like we expect a person to act doesn't have
to mean that the machine's abilities automatically conjure feeling, seeing, smelling,
etc out of thin air?
Craig
Brent
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