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"So if you make that experience a condition for calling another being intelligent, you are effectively saying that nothing but yourself can ever be intelligent.
by garyrob 11y ago
"So if you make that experience a condition for calling another being intelligent, you are effectively saying that nothing but yourself can ever be intelligent."
I think you are confusing the principles of whether an observer can determine whether an entity has an attribute with the question of whether it does in fact have that attribute. But those are entirely different issues because, for one thing, the observer may simply not have the tools yet to make such a judgement.
Matter is made of atoms. For a long time we did not have the tools to determine that. But that didn't change the fact that it was, and is, true.
Now suppose the human race died out before it ever developed such tools. Obviously, it would still be true.
Now suppose that due to our limited intellectual abilities or for some other reason, it never was, or will be, possible to ever develop such tools. To me, it's obvious that that has no bearing on the truth of the proposition any more than if we didn't have time to develop the tools.
Similarly, the question of whether you have awareness is independent of whether I or any other third party can prove you do.
- fauigerzigerk 11y agoI don't necessarily disagree with that, but your argument is nothing more than an appeal to believe in the existence of such properties based on how you yourself feel when you look at something yellow. I don't find that very convincing. But I do agree with you in that the question you asked is worth asking. Not even mentioning the issue is certainly a frequent mistake made by authors taking a purely technological perspective.
- garyrob 11y ago"I don't necessarily disagree with that, but your argument is nothing more than an appeal to believe in the existence of such properties based on how you yourself feel when you look at something yellow. I don't find that very convincing." No... I'm not inviting you to be convinced based on my experience. I'm inviting you to notice how you yourself feel when you yourself look at something yellow. My bet is that you'll experience that which is referred to in the literature as "qualia".
- fauigerzigerk 11y agoMy own experience isn't any more convincing than yours because I don't know what properties are necessary for me to feel the way I feel. I also don't know if my feeling is in any way similar to yours or that of a fly on the wall. So if someone built a very complex machine that was able to communicate with me like a human, and if that machine claimed to feel something very specific at the sight of yellow, it would not feel right for me to say "no, you're not feeling anything like a human would feel" because I don't know how other humans feel. I have no way of comparing my own feelings with those of other humans or non humans.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoEveryone knows qualia exist. The dispute is over whether they're components of the mind's perceptive systems, or whether they're metaphysically queer. The latter position is obviously wrong and requires reams of magical thinking, but being magical, it's more interesting to talk about, so human philosophers, being dumb and untrained humans who don't get the most basic principles of naturalistic wizardry, concentrate on it, to the neglect of the obviously correct and far more useful former line of inquiry, which would actually augment their spellcraft quite a lot. :-p