I think the reason that the hard question is interesting at all is that
it would presumably be OK to torture a zombie because it doesn't actually
experience pain, even though it would react exactly like a human being
tortured. That's an ethical question. Ethics is a belief system that
exists in our minds about what we should or should not do. There is no
objective experiment you can do that will tell you whether any act, such
as inflicting pain on a human, animal, or machine, is ethical or not. The
only thing you can measure is belief, for example, by taking a poll.
What is the point to ethics? The reason why you can't do objective
experiments is because *YOU* don't have a grounded concept of ethics. The
second that you ground your concepts in effects that can be seen in "the
real world", there are numerous possible experiments.
The same is true of consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness is
hard because the question is ungrounded. Define all of the arguments in
terms of things that appear and matter in the real world and the question
goes away. It's only because you invent ungrounded unprovable distinctions
that the so-called hard problem appears.
Torturing a p-zombie is unethical because whether it feels pain or not is
100% irrelevant in "the real world". If it 100% acts as if it feels pain,
then for all purposes that matter it does feel pain. Why invent this
mystical situation where it doesn't feel pain yet acts as if it does?
Richard's paper attempts to solve the hard problem by grounding some of the
silliness. It's the best possible effort short of just ignoring the
silliness and going on to something else that is actually relevant to the
real world.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Mahoney" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <agi@v2.listbox.com>
Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2008 10:02 PM
Subject: RE: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of
consciousness
--- On Sat, 11/15/08, Ed Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
With regard to the second notion,
that conscious phenomena are not subject to scientific explanation, there
is
extensive evidence to the contrary. The prescient psychological writings of
William James, and Dr. Alexander Luria’s famous studies of the effects of
variously located bullet wounds on the minds of Russian soldiers after
World
War II, both illustrate that human consciousness can be scientifically
studied. The effects of various drugs on consciousness have been
scientifically studied.
Richard's paper is only about the "hard" question of consciousness, that
which distinguishes you from a P-zombie, not the easy question about mental
states that distinguish between being awake or asleep.
I think the reason that the hard question is interesting at all is that it
would presumably be OK to torture a zombie because it doesn't actually
experience pain, even though it would react exactly like a human being
tortured. That's an ethical question. Ethics is a belief system that exists
in our minds about what we should or should not do. There is no objective
experiment you can do that will tell you whether any act, such as inflicting
pain on a human, animal, or machine, is ethical or not. The only thing you
can measure is belief, for example, by taking a poll.
-- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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agi
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