On 27 January 2014 16:07, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Do you think Barack Obama is conscious? If you do, then in whatever sense >> you understand that, can the Chinese Room also be conscious? Or do you think >> that is impossible? > > > Yes, I think that Barack Obama is conscious, because he is different from a > building or machine. Buildings and machines cannot be conscious, just as > pictures of people drinking pictures of water do no experience relief from > thirst. If Barack Obama revealed that he was a machine, would that change your view of whether machines could be conscious? > The Chinese Room is not important. You are missing the whole point. > Consciousness is beyond reason and cannot be discovered through evidence or > argument, but sensory experience alone. So the Chinese Room is conscious not through evidence or argument, but through sensory experience alone. >> The claim is that the consciousness of the room stands in relation to the >> physical room as the consciousness of a person stands in relation to the >> physical person. > > > There is no 'physical person', there is a public facing body. A person is > not a body. On one level of an animal's body there are organs which cannot > survive independently of the body as a whole, but on another level all of > those organs are composed of living cells which have more autonomy. > Understanding this theme of coexisting but contrasting levels of description > suggests that a room need not be comparable to the body of a living > organism. Since the room is not something which naturally evolves of its own > motives and sense, we need not assume that the level at which it appears to > us as a room or machine is in fact the relevant level of description when > considering its autonomy and coherence. In my view, the machine expresses > only the lowest levels of immediate thermodynamic sensitivity according to > the substance which is actually reacting, and the most distant levels of > theoretical design, but with nothing in between. We do not have to pretend > that there is no way to guess whether a doll or a cadaver might be > conscious. With an adequate model of qualitative nesting and its relation to > quantitative scale, we can be freed from sophism and pathetic fallacy. An observer might say that the Chinese Room or the AI in "Her" or Barack Obama "naturally evolves of its own motives and sense" after the point of creation. >> It could not become John Wayne physically, and it could not become John >> Wayne mentally if the actual matter in John Wayne is required to reproduce >> John Wayne's mind, but you have not proved that the latter is the case. > > It has nothing to do with matter. There can only ever be one John Wayne. A > person is like a composite snapshot of a unique human lifetime, and the > nesting of that lifetime within a unique cultural zeitgeist. It's all made > of the expression of experience through time. The matter is just the story > told to us by the experiences of eyeballs and fingertips, microscopes, etc. What if it were revealed that John Wayne's body while he was asleep on the night of his 40th birthday was annihilated and replaced by a copy? Would you still say there can only be one John Wayne? Why couldn't we make a John Wayne Mk3 long after his death, who would stand in relation to John Wayne Mk2 as John Wayne Mk2 stood in relation to John Wayne Mk1? >> That's what Searle claims, which is why he makes the Room pass a Turing >> test in Chinese and then purports to prove (invalidly, according to what >> you've said) that despite passing the test it isn't conscious. > > > The question of whether or not a Turing test is possible is beyond the scope > of the the Chinese Room. The Room assumes, for the sake of argument, that > Computationalist assumptions are true, and that a Turing type test would be > useful, and that anything which could pass such a test would have to be > conscious. Searle rightly identifies the futility of looking for outward > appearances to reveal the quality of interior awareness. He successfully > demonstrates that blind syntactic approaches to producing symbols of > consciousness could indeed match any blind semantic approach of expecting > consciousness. And he purports to do that by showing that despite external appearances the Chinese Room cannot be conscious because the components are not conscious, which you agree is not a valid argument. > My hypotheses go further into the ontology of awareness, so > that we are not limited to the blindness of measurable communication in our > empathy, and that our senses extend beyond their own accounts of each other. > Our intuitive capacities can be more fallible than empirical views can > measure, but they can also be more veridical than information based methods > can ever dream of. Intuition, serendipity, and imagination are required to > generate the perpetual denationalization of creators ahead of the created. > This doesn't mean that some people cannot be fooled all of the time or that > all of the people can't be fooled some of the time, only that all of the > people cannot be fooled all of the time. You still haven't come up with any reason better than a vague prejudice why, for example, the AI in the movie "Her" could not be conscious. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
