Terry Blanton wrote:
Here's absolute proof our host is insane:
http://amasci.com/~billb/cgi-bin/instr/instr.html#self
but this is a trait common to all my friends!
This little bit from BB, along with the items he links to, actually
brings up a fascinating question. It is, however, such a slippery
question that (at least) some people are of the opinion that it's not
even valid, and that if properly framed it vanishes.
The question, of course, is "what is consciousness?". You can ask it of
yourself, but you can't really ask anybody else about it, because, as of
this moment in time, there is absolutely no way for you to know whether
anyone else you meet is actually conscious. You (presumably!) know of
your own experience that you are conscious, and that you are aware --
but that proves nothing about any other being.
This isn't a trivial question. Assume for the moment that humans are
basically alike, and so all of them must be "conscious". Now ask
youself if chimpanzees, our closest non-human relatives, are conscious.
Then, how about dogs? Cats? Mice? Fish? Cicadas? Cockroaches? How
about rotifers? Plants? Amoebas? Did we cross a line there? If so,
where was that line?
It's easy to assert that the last two can't be conscious because they
have no nervous systems, but then, what causes a nervous system to be
"conscious"? I have little doubt that neural net programs, running on
ever faster hardware with ever larger memory systems, will eventually
produce an entity that can pass the Turing test, probably in the next
couple decades. Maybe Cyc will do it sooner. Will that entity be
"conscious"? I don't think so. But OTOH I know at least one
intelligent person who _does_ think so. The fascinating point of all
this is that there is, at this time, absolutely no known way to resolve
this!
The standard copout is "Question is unanswerable => question is
meaningless" -- you must have framed it wrong. In this case I think the
copout is incorrect: There's something going on in our heads that we
haven't tracked down, and, it seems to me, it's something we still have
no clue at all about.
The day we can imagine how to build a gedanken machine that would
reliably detect "consciousness", we will have made some progress in
understanding it. Until then discussions of consciousness are likely to
remain reminiscent of Greek philosophers discussing the possible
existence of "atoms". And until then, it will remain impossible to
determine if someone experiencing "dissociation" (or whatever the
technical term for that strange state is) has actually lost
"consciousness" or is merely feeling weird.
(Of course the fundamentalist members of the group no doubt feel they
already know the answers. It shouldn't take more than a few seconds to
see the problem with that position, however.)
