Re: Fwd: Implementation/Relativity

From: Hans Moravec <hpm.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 22:29:19 -0400

Russell Standish <R.Standish.domain.name.hidden>:
> conciousness we experience directly ... generated by some kind of
> self-referential process ... is intrinsically a different to
> the Turing type tests we perform to attribute conciousness in
> external objects.
> ...
> nor do I think it a particularly useful way of
> thinking.

But it is enormously useful for deciding whether to deal with
particular robots as conscious!

Yours isn't. Your quest already has a few centuries of western
philosophy of mind under its belt, and is no closer to finding the
objective qualities that constitute consciousness. Like the effort
to define the properties of phlogiston or the luminiferous ether,
it doesn't work because its subject matter is an abstraction that
changes with viewpoint.
Received on Tue Jul 27 1999 - 19:34:21 PDT