David Nyman wrote:
>
>On Oct 9, 8:54 pm, George Levy <g....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
>
>
>>To observe a split consciousness, you need an observer who is also
>>split, in sync with the split consciousness, across time, space,
>>substrate and level (a la Zelazny - Science Fiction writer). In your
>>example, for an observer to see consciousness in the machine, he must be
>>willing to exist at the earlier interval, skip over the time delay
>>carrying the recording and resume his existence at the later interval.
>>If he observes only a part of the whole thing, say the recording, he may
>>conclude that the machine is not conscious.
>>
>>
>
>Careful, George. Remember the observer *is* the machine. Consequently
>he's never in a position to 'conclude that the machine is not
>conscious', because in that case, it is precisely *he* that is not
>conscious.
>
There is no question that the machine needs to be conscious - this is
the whole point of the experiment - The observer *may* be the machine,
but does not have to be (we could conduct a Turing test for example). In
any case I think there may be great benefit in decoupling the observer
function explicitely. The presence of such an observer and its location
with respect the machine will force the issue on the first and third
person perspective.
In fact the consciousness of the observer is not really at issue. What I
think is at issue is the consciousness of the machine as seen from
different perspectives. It may even be sufficient to make the observer
some kind of testing program running on a computer.
>But you're right IMO that the the concatenation of these
>observer moments represents the observer's conscious 'existence in
>time' . The 1-person narrative of this concatenation is what comprises
>IMO, the A-series (i.e. the conscious discriminability of observer
>moments arising from the consistent 1-person compresence of global and
>local aspects of the observer), whereas any 3-person account of this is
>necessarily stripped back to a B-series that reduces, ultimately, to
>Planck-length 'snapshots' devoid of temporality.
>
>David
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Received on Mon Oct 09 2006 - 17:56:15 PDT