On Sun, Mar 25, 2018 at 11:01:22AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 21 Mar 2018, at 01:35, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 7:27 PM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected] > > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > > > >You don't need an instrument that can give a clean yes/no answer to the > > presence of consciousness to develop scientific theories about > > consciousness. We can start with the observation that all normal healthy > > humans are conscious, and that rocks and other inert objects are not > > conscious and work from there to develop a science of consciousness, based > > on evidence from the observation of behaviour. > > > > But if it was all based on the observation of behavior then what you'd end > > up with is a scientific theory about intelligence not consciousness. > > That is right. But if you agree that consciousness is a form of non-provable but also non-doubtable knowledge,
Only with self-awareness. A non self-aware consciousness (if such a thing exists) would have no knowledge whatsoever of its consciousness. > and if you agree with the standard definition of knowledge in philosophy of mind, But isn't the Theatetus formula more a property of knowledge, rather than being equivalent to knowledge itself? Couldn't Bp & P describe things other than knowledge? then it is a theorem that Peano Arithmetic is conscious. To believe that Robinson Arithmetic is conscious too (plausibly even more) is more tricky. > The premisses are already quite stretch :) -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow [email protected] Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
