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Newbie question

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1modalursine
Muokkaaja: marraskuu 8, 2009, 1:40 pm

I've started reading Susan Backmore's "Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction", part of the Oxford press series.

She treats the question of whether consciousness is "something added" or whether creatures who perceive the outer world, perform logic, and/or make decisions must necessarily have consciousness to do those things.

But hasnt that question been settled by the existence of man made devices which all agree (Except maybe extreme animists) have no consciousness but can nevertheless , through sensors, "perceive" (i.e. be programmed to react to) light and sound etc and can perform logic, mathematical, and can, to some extent, perform complex cognitive tasks such as face recognition?

Cant we answer in the affirmative, "Yes Virginia, Zombies can exist, and you can buy some at your local consumer electronics store" ? They can't converse well enough to fool a sophisticated observer, but they can do a fair number of things which formerly were considered to take "intelligence" to perform, and there's no theoretical reason to believe their performance cant be improved to human levels.

The world champion chess player (dont know about checkers) is a zombi (ok, a computer program....same thing).

So you dont need to have consciousness to play world class chess. Absolutely proven; or am I wrong?

2richardbsmith
marraskuu 8, 2009, 3:22 pm

modalursine,

Can you really claim newbie status?

3modalursine
marraskuu 9, 2009, 8:40 pm

ref #2
Unless you count the undergraduate "Contemporary Civilization" ( a sort of history of western ideas survey course, from the pre Socratics to hmmmm...did we get as far as Freud? ), I've never taken a philosophy course even at the undergraduate level, let alone grad school; so yes, in philosophy a newbie at best.

4bumblesby
marraskuu 12, 2009, 10:58 pm

Hmmm... Me: a newbie just starting an interest in philosophy and very ignorant....

Since I am a computer programmer - not in any way on the level of creating a program to play chess - the question used "creature". I would take that as a living biological creature not a machine. Since humans program the logic into the machines, you could say that machines are an extension of the human mind. The machines and software would not exist without humans inventing them.

To me, it all depends on how you define "consciousness". In Eastern thought it is both very big and very small and more than what the "mind" can perceive. I am speaking from ignorance here, but I understand it as life itself; beyond birth and death; both material and non-material. Whether a non-human mind is aware of this or capable of being aware of this is another matter. Many humans are not aware of this - that is why it is called "awakening".

Many humans think consciousness is their mind - their ability to think; the "chattering monkey". It is so much more than that - to me ;)

5jahn
marraskuu 13, 2009, 3:52 am

Humans can observe their observance, we all know they can - but that is absurd. It can not be logically explained what we mean by that, and so it cannot be built into a robot.
So who or what observes our observance? This phenomenon disappears in the "experience" available in a movie theatre (or anywhere else that feelings are evoked in the recognition of parts of our knowledge). It exists only in discovery. I am saying that there might possibly be a Heraklitean "logos" common to all out there.

6steve.clason
marraskuu 21, 2009, 3:58 pm

Not that I've pondered it in depth, but "consciousness" seems to suggest an element of self-awareness, or self-alienation. So, a chimpanzee can make a decision (as can a computer program or an AND gate), but can't agonize about whether or not they made the right decision which I believe disqualifies their intelligence as "consciousness".

I do like the idea of a computer program that questions its decisions but I don't think that would qualify as "consciousness" either, though I'm going to have to think about that some.