On 3/15/2015 7:57 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:> You assume that intelligence only comes from brains. Only a fool would not assume that and I am not a fool.> It is true that drugs that make brains less intelligent make them less conscious. But it might not be true of, for example Watson, because Watson's intelligencedepends on accessing an huge database (the web).Although much of his knowledge originally came from the internet the Jeopardy champagne Watson did not have internet access,all it had to relay on was it's internal memory.> If you cut off its access it would be much less intelligent, it would be like a scholar whose library was taken away.The correct analogue would be a scholar who's memory had been totally erased, in which case he would no longer be a scholar; and without language his incoherent grunts would no longer be judged as being very intelligent behavior by most.> The scholar is not less consciousI can't prove it of course, I can't prove anything about consciousness, but nevertheless I believe that someone with no memory would be less conscious,
But you've exaggerated the example to create a straw man. Watson has some local database, he doesn't access the web for everything; so my analogy is correct. Watson, like the scholar, would be less intelligent, know the answer to fewer questions, but Watson would still do the same searches and inferences - simply on a small amount of data. Similarly, a young child behaves less intelligently than an adult simply because he has fewer mental tools and less background knowledge. But there's no reason to think he's less conscious. Bruno would say he's less competent, but more intelligent, but you seem to identify competence and intelligence. Which is reasonable in the short run.
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