4 ms·
>No conscious being can know, with 100% certainty, that a particular entity is NOT conscious. You might be interested in a very short 2011 paper of mine, "A pa
by xamuel 8y ago
>No conscious being can know, with 100% certainty, that a particular entity is NOT conscious.
You might be interested in a very short 2011 paper of mine, "A paradox related to the Turing Test", on page 90 here:
https://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/researchcentres/reasoning/TheReasoner/vol5/TheReasoner-5(6).pdf https://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/researchcentres/reasoning/TheRea...
I'll paraphrase the paradox here. Suppose you can magically detect conscious entities. I begin speaking to you, and you are obliged to periodically guess whether or not I'm conscious.
Here's what I'll do. Whenever you are guessing that I'm conscious, my entire dialog will consist of nothing but "Uhhhh..." over and over, until you change your mind and start thinking I'm non-conscious. Whenever you are guessing that I'm non-conscious, then I'll speak normally.
Since I AM conscious, and you have your magic conscious-detecting ability, you should eventually reach a state where you're certain I'm conscious, and you don't need to change your mind any more thereafter. But once we've reached that state, which only takes finitely much time (so for all you know my whole dialogue could've been a tape recording), thereafter I only ever say "Uhhhh..." A non-conscious machine could do that, so do you change your mind? If you do, contradiction, if you don't, contradiction.
- credit_guy 8y agoI would reach the conclusion that you are conscious, but a bit obnoxious or you like playing games.
- xamuel 8y agoYou're implicitly assuming that you yourself have free will and/or are too complicated for a computer to mimic. Because if not, then I could just be a computer which doesn't even hear the words you are saying, and is merely reacting to the words I would hear if I did have ears (which I can do because I have your entire sourcecode built into me). The longer you meditate upon this very silly paradox, the more unsettling it becomes :)
- red75prime 8y agoIt is possibly the reason why some people believe that consciousness requires some kind of Cartesian pineal gland which connect our physical brain to metaphysical consciousness. So we don't need to analyze behavior, we just need to look for the presence of the "gland". The problem still stands though. We can't be sure that the "gland" connects to metaphysical consciousness and not to the metaphysical cloud processor. Nowadays the "gland" is usually mysterious quantum processes.
- im3w1l 8y ago100% certainty means either 100% prior or some completely waterproof evidence neither of which ever happen for any question. Still interesting result!