John K Clark wrote:
"Matt Mahoney" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
It seems to me the problem is
defining consciousness, not testing for it.
And it seems to me that beliefs of this sort are exactly the reason
philosophy is in such a muddle. A definition of consciousness is not
needed, in fact unless you're a mathematician where they can be of
some use, one can lead a full rich rewarding intellectually life without
having a good definition of anything. Compared with examples
definitions are of trivial importance.
John K Clark
But consciousness is easy to define, if not to implement:
Consciousness is the entity evaluating a portion of itself which
represents it's position in it's model of it's environment.
If there's any aspect of consciousness which isn't included within this
definition, I would like to know about it. (Proving the definition
correct would, however, be between difficult and impossible. As
normally used "consciousness" is a term without an external referent, so
there's no way of determining that any two people are using the same
definition. It *may* be possible to determine that they are using
different definitions.)
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singularity
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