On 10/1/2013 9:56 PM, Pierz wrote:
Yes, I understand that to be Chalmer's main point. Although, if the qualia can be different, it does present issues - how much and in what way can it vary?
Yes, that's a question that interests me because I want to be able to build intelligent machines and so I need to know what qualia they will have, if any. I think it will depend on their sensors and on their values/goals. If I build a very intelligent Mars Rover, capable of learning and reasoning, with a goal of discovering whether there was once life on Mars; then I expect it will experience pleasure in finding evidence regarding this. But no matter how smart I make it, it won't experience lust.
I'm curious what the literature has to say about that. And if functionalism means reproducing more than the mere functional output of a system, if it potentially means replication down to the elementary particles and possibly their quantum entanglements, then duplication becomes impossible, not merely technically but in principle. That seems against the whole point of functionalism - as the idea of "function" is reduced to something almost meaningless.
I think functionalism must be confined to the classical functions, discounting the quantum level effects. But it must include some behavior that is almost entirely internal - e.g. planning, imagining. Excluding quantum entanglements isn't arbitrary; there cannot have been any evolution of goals and values based on quantum entanglement (beyond the statistical effects that produce decoherence and quasi-classical behavior).
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