On 2 August 2016 at 23:01, David Lochrin <[email protected]> wrote:
> Why not make the same claim about other people? After all, they are just > physical stuff - wet logic circuits - they couldn't possibly have conscious > sensation. I mean, how could it work? > > In this case we propose to construct an analogue of the brain (a neural > network) using familiar electronic components, and of course ignoring > actual feasibility. Then what do you suppose would happen? There would > certainly be lots of electrical activity, the network would go from one > state to another, but would it become conscious? If so, how? You tell > me... And no appeal to "magic happens here" is allowed, we're looking for > an explanation. > You haven't answered the question of why you can't make exactly the same argument about other humans. Your argument is equally applicable and unless you can answer that your argument has a massive hole. We can't "see" other people's subjective consciousness. That's the way it is. Their subjective self-consciousness is them seeing or sensing themselves sensing. It is a privileged position, almost by definition unobservable. We cannot physically place an observer where they will see another person's consciousness directly from their point of view. So we can't "prove" it exists in that way. However, despite this practical issue, no one seriously doubts other people's consciousness. (We can't see black holes directly either. We infer them.) It is actually pretty easy to determine that other people are conscious. We talk to them. We model them. We can check whether they might be lying. If you ask someone if they see a red ball and the red ball is actually there and they say that they see it is there then they are functionally conscious of the red ball. End of story. Obviously, they might be blind and lying but we can check that out. It's not that hard. Move it, they notice. If you want to know whether they are self-conscious you ask them questions that are self referential: Do you only see the red ball or do you see the ball, and, know that you are seeing it? All this is relatively straightforward - compared to determining the existence, size and location of black holes - just about anyone could do it. Obviously, if you can do this with a human, you can do it with an alien or an AI. The language might be different, you might have to rephrase the questions, etc, but it is fundamentally the same process. Where we appear to disagree it this intangible extra component that you see as fundamental and I see as basically structural detail. You seem to think that there is a way for for a human/AI/alien/whatever to be looking at a red ball, be quasi-continuously aware of themselves as a separate distinct entity looking at a red ball, to be able to report it in some fashion - both to themselves and to others - and to be able to answer questions about their experience, and yet not be conscious. I see that as totally absurd. That is consciousness. Consciousness is not a yes/no condition but particular accumulations of capabilities. An AI will have a radically different sensing apparatus and brain structure to you but (if and when it exists) if it can honestly answer simple questions about its experience it is conscious. Is this a trivial design problem? No, right now we don't know how to make such a beast. Will it see the same red as you do? No, different sensors, different circuits. Does it have an identical sense of being as you? Of course not. Could it be a much dumber program that has been designed just to fool you? Sure, but keep asking questions and you can reach a higher level of confidence. This picture doesn't rely on magic as you are suggesting. You might not know how a fridge works, but you can easily tell that it cools things down. The hard problem of refrigeration is how it makes the radically different property of coldness out of pipes, wires, motors and compressors. Fridge as are understood, brains are not. And, fridges don't do self-reference. Yet. Jim _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
