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Yes, this is closely connected to the question of qualia, and the concept of a "philosophical zombie" [0]. On the one hand, naive human intuition seems to sugg
by _dps 9y ago
Yes, this is closely connected to the question of qualia, and the concept of a "philosophical zombie" [0].
On the one hand, naive human intuition seems to suggest that the "movie playing in your head" would not emerge from any number of transistors and wires connected to each other.
On the other hand, it's not clear how you can argue that what goes on in our own heads is physically any different. So that leads you either to religion, or to the idea that somehow consciousness has to emerge from interactions of matter. And if that's the case, it raises all sorts of ethical questions about the creation of artifacts that might (some day) exhibit consciousness. And, of course, there are already many ethical questions about how we treat animals in the here-and-now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
- smokeyj 9y ago> So that leads you either to religion, or to the idea that somehow consciousness has to emerge from interactions of matter. Doesn't seem like they're mutually exclusive. I mean, I'm pretty confident I can interact with some matter and produce another human. If or how God plays a role seems to be the unknown factor.
- CuriouslyC 9y agoWhy does consciousness have to emerge? Why can't it be intrinsic?
- StavrosK 9y agoIntrinsic to what? Individual molecules don't have consciousness, a group of them forming a brain does. It has to emerge at some point.
- CuriouslyC 9y agoHow do you know an individual molecule doesn't have consciousness?
- red75prime 9y agoThere's no observable effects to distinguish conscious and unconscious molecule. Having a definition that can't be used for experimental validation is not useful.
- CuriouslyC 9y agoThere's no observable evidence for an internal experience in humans either. Each person just extrapolates that belief from their own consciousness. That is what got us into the silly position that animals don't possess consciousness in the first place.
- red75prime 9y agoWe can talk for hours about consciousness in the sense "what it is like to be bacterium", and it will lead us nowhere, or, better to say, it will lead us all over the place. Ask different philosophers. On the other hand we can agree that we can sufficiently easily distinguish conscious and unconscious human, dog or other mammal. From here we can study which parts of a brain participate in conscious activities, and maybe generalize it for species further away from us.
- CuriouslyC 9y agoPart of the problem here is conflating terms. I define consciousness as the property of having an internal experience. It would be better to describe someone "unconscious" as unresponsive. You don't know that they are not having an internal experience at that moment in time. Even if they told you later that they weren't having an internal experience, that only tells you that they have no memory an internal experience, it does not prove that no such experience occurred. I quit pursuing philosophy as an academic matter when I realized that these sorts of conflations are at the root of most philosophical debates. In fact, I'll go ahead and state that the single most contested subject in modern philosophy is the definition of the word "is".
- 9y ago