On 16 April 2015 at 09:51, Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au <javascript:;>> wrote: > meekerdb wrote: >> >> On 4/15/2015 12:03 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: >>> >>> >>> But the question of the number of person is a different discussion. If >>> you agree that the W-guy, who stays in W and marries a girl in W, is the >>> same person as the guy in M, who marries a woman in M, are the same person >>> ... as the H-guy, the, I claim, we are already all the same person, despite >>> different lives and consciousness. >> >> >> But then you're just mucking up the meaning of "the same person", giving >> it a special metaphorical poetic meaning, unrelated to common usage. > > > Yes. I think that Bruno's treatment sometimes lacks philosophical > sophistication.
A rigorous philosophical analysis usually starts with a definition, but it's very difficult to define consciousness. However, you can have a quite fruitful discussion about consciousness without explicitly defining, implicitly using a minimal operational definition: you know it if you have it. Surprisingly, even the consciousness deniers and consciousness eliminators seem to know exactly what it is we are talking about! > Computationalism is based on the idea that human > consciousness is Turing emulable, which just says that human-like AI is > possible on a sufficiently sophisticated computer. But,as Bruno says, > consciousness is not duplicable -- we cannot know, for ourselves, what > another's consciousness is, so we cannot know whether it is a duplicate or > not. That we cannot know does not mean it isn't possible. We cannot know that a world exists outside our minds, but it is still possible. That aside, we *can* know, from our own introspection, that the brain replacement has worked to the same extent that we can know we are the same person from moment to moment. It's unreasonable to require a higher standard of proof than this. > My feeling is that even a digital copy from a computer-based AI will diverge > so rapidly from the original once it is installed and run on another > computer that there is no sense in which it is ever the 'same' > consciousness. You could run the AI in a virtual environment with the same starting parameters and no external inputs and be confident that it will have the same consciousness. Also, in a large enough universe a finite consciousness (implemented on a finite state machine) will repeat. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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 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. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
