Re: Implementation

From: SLP <SLP.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 20:54:15 -0500

SLP:
I certainly wouldn't because that's not remotely how brains, the only
known conscious systems, work. The lookup table route is one way to
produce a zombie, meaning: a Turing test passer that has no internal
qualia.

HM:
The confusion results from people trying to define consciousness
as an objective property, when it's not……Let me repeat my firm position:
consciousness is an attribution we place on behavior, a subjective
matter, not an objective fact.

SLP:
Consciousness means having a self, having qualia. It has nothing to do
with behavior. People with the locked-in syndrome (a very tragic and
usually quickly fatal neurologic condition) are conscious, although you
wouldn't know it from their behavior. We are already learning some
neurophysiologic correlates of consciousness, and can detect these with
objective tests such as fMRI, MEG, and so forth. The term "subjective"
becomes meaningful ONLY when there is a consciousness, not the other way
around. If you undergo anesthesia, and feel your consciousness rapidly
slipping away to nothing, you realize that it is an objective thing.
Until we understand the actual neural machinery of brains, and
generalize its abstract principles to nonbiological systems, we won't
know how to build conscious robots. That's a task that I'm reasonably
confident will be accomplished sometime in the 21st century--in the
meantime, we need to build up the experimental base in neurophysiology,
and look to build neural networks that (a) follow biological models and
(b) show evolvability. "Rome wasn't built in a day," and it wasn't
built with speculative talk--so also with building consciousness.


Steve Price, MD
Received on Tue Jul 27 1999 - 19:04:50 PDT