On 31/05/2012 12:45, Peter Lennox wrote:
sensation, inevitably a poor
copy of reality. Whilst philosophers are entirely comfortable with such thought experiments, there is no obvious pragmatic way to investigate such speculations. By definition, if an artificial environment is detectable as such, then it is imperfectly executed and the hypothetical position has not been matched. On the other hand, if the artificial environment were perfectly rendered, there would be no way to prove its artificiality." [ my thesis, some years ago]
Sometimes language can make us think we are saying something more than we really are. Purely as a logical statement in a language all this is saying is: if two environments are indistinguishable, they are indistinguishable. We are simply replacing a condition with the same expression as an assertion, and then saying that proves the condition. "If 2==2, there is no way of distinguishing one integer from the other." Except perhaps if the person is told (or otherwise knows a priori, or if necessary is reminded) "this is the artificial environment".
The only reason it seems to me that the "hypothesis" has any meaning is that (one presumes) the environment being represented is one that is captivating but variously impossible, inaccessible or unaffordable; in which case neither the condition nor the assertion is testable. Chances are, 99.9% of people using a flight simulator will ~never~ experience the real thing, so they really have no basis on which to evaluate its authenticity, beyond the ~sense~ that it is in some way convincing, and is in some to-be-defined cognitive sense transparent. So perhaps that hypothesis is really trying to propose that an artificial environment in which one ~forgets~ one is in an artificial environment, is equal to the real environment it imitates. The variable is then not the environment but the forgetting. It would appear that some are easily persuaded. But turning the somewhat capricious and probably non-algorithmic human capacity to forget where one is seems at best an unreliable basis for any sort of objective testable hypothesis.
Richard Dobson _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list [email protected] https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
