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Communications are regularly attributed to the United States in law and diplomacy, and the humans who carry out those communications will often have personal vi

by sjy 11y ago

Communications are regularly attributed to the United States in law and diplomacy, and the humans who carry out those communications will often have personal views that are inconsistent with the state's position. The concept of a 'board decision' itself implies the attribution of intention, which is one aspect of consciousness, to a corporation. Any board resolution that is carried by majority reflects the will of a 'separate corporate mind' overriding the conscious decisions of the dissenting directors.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
I disagree. You're still confusing goal seeking with consciousness. You can easily automate goal-seeking, so goal-seeking and intention are not nearly a sufficient condition for consciousness. On your basis you could impute consciousness to any cybernetic system that takes a majority decision - such as the navigation systems on the old Shuttle. And just because communications are attributed to a nation, doesn't mean you're dealing with anything more than a diplomatic convention. In practice you're still dealing with leaders and representatives, and the leaders will set policy. Without the leaders there is no entity - and in fact it's also known in diplomacy that you can decapitate a country simply by killing its leadership, or define a new country by changing its leadership. A change of leadership creates a change of identity and intention, even though the rest of the things it does remain broadly unchanged. Compare that with human brain, where there are no "leadership neurons". There are broad areas of the brain that integrate experience and are involved in making decisions, but you can't point to one neuron and say "That's the president", or to one group and say "That's the ruling party." More, there's no self-awareness. These arguments are kind of pointless without a final definition of consciousness, but it seems likely to me that entities that act in conscious ways have some internal representation of a persistent self which is perceived - somehow, in a magical way we don't understand - as a unified self-identity. So you need two things for that. One is a persistent representation of self. And the other is the ability to experience that representation as a singular self-definition. Humans are embodied, so we know what experience is. Corporations, countries, and bird flocks aren't. If you invade a large land area, remove a source of profit, or trap half a flock of starlings in a net, no singular embodied experience corresponds to that loss. You can predict goal-seeking behaviours, and you can find individual responses to individual circumstances. But all of those fail the requirement for a single unified self-aware change in state. Otherwise you'd have to argue that countries somehow feel pain when they're invaded. Citizens may feel pain, especially if they're killed, injured, or made homeless. But countries?

by sjy 11y ago

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago

I disagree. You're still confusing goal seeking with consciousness. You can easily automate goal-seeking, so goal-seeking and intention are not nearly a sufficient condition for consciousness. On your basis you could impute consciousness to any cybernetic system that takes a majority decision - such as the navigation systems on the old Shuttle. And just because communications are attributed to a nation, doesn't mean you're dealing with anything more than a diplomatic convention. In practice you're still dealing with leaders and representatives, and the leaders will set policy. Without the leaders there is no entity - and in fact it's also known in diplomacy that you can decapitate a country simply by killing its leadership, or define a new country by changing its leadership. A change of leadership creates a change of identity and intention, even though the rest of the things it does remain broadly unchanged. Compare that with human brain, where there are no "leadership neurons". There are broad areas of the brain that integrate experience and are involved in making decisions, but you can't point to one neuron and say "That's the president", or to one group and say "That's the ruling party." More, there's no self-awareness. These arguments are kind of pointless without a final definition of consciousness, but it seems likely to me that entities that act in conscious ways have some internal representation of a persistent self which is perceived - somehow, in a magical way we don't understand - as a unified self-identity. So you need two things for that. One is a persistent representation of self. And the other is the ability to experience that representation as a singular self-definition. Humans are embodied, so we know what experience is. Corporations, countries, and bird flocks aren't. If you invade a large land area, remove a source of profit, or trap half a flock of starlings in a net, no singular embodied experience corresponds to that loss. You can predict goal-seeking behaviours, and you can find individual responses to individual circumstances. But all of those fail the requirement for a single unified self-aware change in state. Otherwise you'd have to argue that countries somehow feel pain when they're invaded. Citizens may feel pain, especially if they're killed, injured, or made homeless. But countries?