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OK but here's a little gedankenexperiment: suppose I had a machine that could simultaneously simulate 2 consciousnesses (either parent/child configuration or si

by pizza 9y ago

OK but here's a little gedankenexperiment: suppose I had a machine that could simultaneously simulate 2 consciousnesses (either parent/child configuration or sibling), (bear with me) import recordings from conscious beings, and allowed one consciousness to query the other. Then it could know if someone were conscious or not. (if I am getting this right) those would be the minimal criteria for being able to (contentiously) prove if a person were conscious or not. But the thing about humans is that they cannot simulate 2 consciousnesses simultaneously (apart from culturally-designated illness known as multiple personality disorder), nor can we import another's consciousness. Nor do we even particularly (barring Totoni's work, or Tegmark's work] know what consciousness is. Those two properties are (probably) never going to be human-capable. In that regard, humans are unlikely to be able to ever be a (or 'the') kind of being used to determine whether or not something is conscious; if ever it will be possible, that will be a machine's task.

yorwba 9y ago
> Then it could know if someone were conscious or not. How? You say "query", but what would the query look like?
- pizza 9y ago
  subsumption followed by introspection
leakydropout 9y ago
"What is it like to be a bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). In it, Nagel argues that materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness, namely that there is something that it is (or feels) like to be a particular, conscious thing. He argued that an organism had conscious mental states, "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism." Dennett denies Nagel's claim that the bat's consciousness is inaccessible, contending that any "interesting or theoretically important" features of a bat's consciousness would be amenable to third-person observation. For instance, it is clear that bats cannot detect objects more than a few meters away because echolocation has a limited range. He holds that any similar aspects of its experiences could be gleaned by further scientific experiments. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F Heterophenomenology ("phenomenology of another, not oneself") is a term coined by Daniel Dennett to describe an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. It consists of applying the scientific method with an anthropological bent, combining the subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine their mental state. The goal is to discover how the subject sees the world him- or herself, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology

by pizza 9y ago

yorwba 9y ago

> Then it could know if someone were conscious or not. How? You say "query", but what would the query look like?

pizza 9y ago
subsumption followed by introspection

leakydropout 9y ago

"What is it like to be a bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). In it, Nagel argues that materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness, namely that there is something that it is (or feels) like to be a particular, conscious thing. He argued that an organism had conscious mental states, "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism." Dennett denies Nagel's claim that the bat's consciousness is inaccessible, contending that any "interesting or theoretically important" features of a bat's consciousness would be amenable to third-person observation. For instance, it is clear that bats cannot detect objects more than a few meters away because echolocation has a limited range. He holds that any similar aspects of its experiences could be gleaned by further scientific experiments. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F Heterophenomenology ("phenomenology of another, not oneself") is a term coined by Daniel Dennett to describe an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. It consists of applying the scientific method with an anthropological bent, combining the subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine their mental state. The goal is to discover how the subject sees the world him- or herself, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology