On 9/22/2012 10:53 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 3:03 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com
<mailto:whatsons...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> If anyone is not familiar with David Chalmers "Absent Qualia, Fading
Qualia,
Dancing Qualia" You should have a look at it
<http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html>
first.
It's some reductio arguments in favor of functionalism (i.e. comp). I find these
arguments convincing. So in building an intelligent robot it is almost certain that a
sufficiently high level of intelligence we will have created a conscious robot. But I
don't think it follows that the robot's consciousness will be the same as ours - because
it's not the same even between different human beings. In particular I refer to
synasthesia and certain mathematical savants who seem to have some different consciousness
than I do. So for me the interesting question is how to build a robot with different
consciousness in prespecified ways?
Brent
I confess I have not read it because I have little confidence it's any better than the
Chinese Room. Well OK I exaggerate, it's probably better than that (what isn't) but
there is something about all these anti AI thought experiments that has always confused
me. Let's suppose I'm dead wrong and Chambers really has found something new and strange
and maybe even paradoxical about consciousness, what I want to know is why am I required
to explain it if I want to continue to believe that a intelligent computers would be
conscious? Whatever argument Chambers has it could just as easily be turned against the
idea that the intelligent behavior of other people indicates consciousness, and yet not
one person on this list believes in Solipsism, not even the most vocal AI critics. Why?
Why is it that I must find the flaws in all these thought experiments but the anti AI
people feel no need to do so?
In the extraordinarily unlikely event that Chambers has shown that consciousness is
paradoxical (and its probably just as childish as all the others) I would conclude that
he just made an error someplace that nobody has found yet. When Zeno showed that motion
was paradoxical nobody thought that motion did not exist but that Zeno just made a
mistake, and he did, although the error wasn't found till the invention of the Calculus
thousands of years later.
John K Clark
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