On Tuesday, April 29, 2014 12:22:23 PM UTC+1, telmo_menezes wrote: > > > > > On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 12:00 PM, Samiya Illias > <samiya...@gmail.com<javascript:> > > wrote: > >> An interesting conversation: >> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/feeling-our-emotions/?page=1 >> Bruno, can this be developed in a machine? >> Samiya >> >> *MIND*: Do you believe that we will someday be able to create artificial >> consciousness and feelings? >> >> *Damasio*: An organism can possess feelings only when it can create a >> representation of the body's functions and the related changes that occur >> in the brain. In this way, the organism can perceive them. Without this >> mechanism there would be no consciousness. >> > This is an unfalsifiable claim. > Right. This is something about a lot of current thinking that puzzles me. If the reasonable starting position is that we have absolutely no clue what something is, yet believe it is extremely important. And if that thing is surrounded now by mysticism, pseudo-science, endless wondrous illustrative imaginings. Then what does this look like? It looks like the way things were right back at the start. It looks like what the very first pioneers were up against. So in my view that's where to start. Obviously exactly like that, but they used certain approaches that implicitly recognized it wasn't worth trying to guess. It was better to keep everything simple and nail everything hard to an early correction by empirical means. Do it that way, and the whole process will naturally stay intertwined with prediction and falsification. It'll grow organically, and eventually there'll complex arrangements that involve predictions at every level and new things will be getting said about the nature of consciousness that no one would have dreamed of. But this time, it'll be things with large crossovers into new technologies and new fields and who knows what
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