Hi Steve, One of my clients holds a few patents in brain imaging technology, and he often asserts "I've looked for that little homunculus far and wide, but could not find him". I suspect something similar with the artificial version of consiousness, it's not something that can be easily put in a box as such. A good example of this is a bee or ant colony; clearly there is a large scale consiousness at work here even if the individual bees or ants seem a bit thick headed. Does the consciousness reside in the bee, or the spaces between the bees? Maybe the question is being phrased too poorly to provide sufficient space for an answer.
As regards Bill, he looks more bored than mad to me, and he has good teeth. Who's your dentist, Bill? K. -----Original Message----- From: Stephen A. Lawrence [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2005 2:50 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [OT] Insane Host 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.)
