John Mikes writes:
> Stathis, your post is 'logical', 'professional', 'smart', - good.
> It shows why we have so many posts on this list and why we get nowhere.
> You handle an assumption (robot) - its qualia, characteristics, make up a
> "thought-situation" and ASK about its annexed details. Now, your style is
> such that one cannot just disregard the irrelevance. So someone (many, me
> included<G>) respond with similar mindtwists and it goes on and on. \
> Have you ever ps-analyzed a robot? Professionally, I mean.
> If it is a simple digital computer, it certainly has a memory, the one fixed
> into chips as this PC I am using. Your and MY memory is quite different, I
> wish somebody could tell me acceptably, HOW???, but it is plastic,
> approximate, mixed with emotional changes, short and in cases false. I would
> throw out a robot with such memory.
I did put in parentheses "this of course assumes a robot can have experiences".
We can't know that this is so, but it seems a reasonable assumption to me. If we
had evolution with digital processors rather than biological processors do you think
it would have been possible for animals with similar behaviours to those with which
we are familiar to have developed? If so, do you think these animals would not
really have "experiences" despite behaving as if they did? Since evolution can only
work on behaviour, if zombie animals were possible why did we not evolve to be
zombie animals?
Stathis Papaioannou
> John,
>
> I should have been more precise with the terms "copy" and "emulate".
> What I was asking is whether a robot which experiences something while
> it is shovelling coal (this of course assumes that a robot can have
> experiences)
> would experience the same thing if it were fed input to all its sensors
> exactly
> the same as if it were doing its job normally, such that it was not aware
> the
> inputs were in fact a sham. It seems to me that if the answer is "no" the
> robot
> would need to have some mysterious extra-computational knowledge of the
> world, which I find very difficult to conceptualise if we are talking about
> a standard
> digital computer. It is easier to conceptualise that such non-computational
> effects
> may be at play in a biological brain, which would then be an argument
> against
> computationalism.
>
> Stathis Papaioannou
>
> > Stathis:
> > let me skip the quoted texts and ask a particular question.
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Stathis Papaioannou" <stathispapaioannou.domain.name.hidden>
> > Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 11:41 PM
> > Subject: RE: Maudlin's Demon (Argument)
> > You wrote:
> > Do you believe it is possible to copy a particular consciousness by
> > emulating it, along
> > with sham inputs (i.e. in virtual reality), on a general purpose computer?
> > Or do you believe
> > a coal-shovelling robot could only have the coal-shovelling experience by
> > actually shovelling
> > coal?
> >
> > Stathis Papaioannou
> > ---------------------------------
> > My question is about 'copy' and 'emulate'.
> >
> > Are we considering 'copying' the model and its content (in which case the
> > coal shoveling robot last sentence applies) or do we include the
> > interconnections unlimited in "experience", beyond the particular model we
> > talk about?
> > If we go "all the way" and include all input from the unlimited totality
> > that may 'format' or 'complete' the model-experience, then we re-create
> the
> > 'real thing' and it is not a copy. If we restrict our copying to the
> aspect
> > in question (model) then we copy only that aspect and should not draw
> > conclusions on the total.
> >
> > Can we 'emulate' totality? I don't think so. Can we copy the total,
> > unlimited wholeness? I don't think so.
> > What I feel is a restriction to "think" within a model and draw
> conclusions
> > from it towards beyond it.
> > Which looks to me like a category-mistake.
> >
> > John Mikes
>
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Received on Sat Oct 07 2006 - 19:51:15 PDT