Colin Hales writes:
> So, I have my zombie scientist and my human scientist and I ask them to do
> science on exquisite novelty. What happens? The novelty is invisible to
> the zombie, who has the internal life of a dreamless sleep. The reason it
> is invisible is because there is no phenomenal consciousness. The zombie
> has only sensory data to use to do science. There are an infinite number
> of ways that same sensory data could arrive from an infinity of external
> natural world situtations. The sensory data is ambiguous - it's all the
> same - action potential pulse trains traveling from sensors to brain.
All I have to work on is sensory data also. I can't be certain that there is a
"real world" out there, and even if there is, all I can possibly do is create a
virtual reality in my head which correlates with the patterns of sense data I
receive. Certainly, it is ambiguous, and that is why we have science: we come
up with a model or hypothesis consistent with the sense data, then we look for
more sense data to test it. Any machine which looks for regularities in sensory
feeds does the same thing. Are you saying that such a machine could not find
the regularities or that if it did find the regularities it would thereby be conscious?
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Fri Nov 24 2006 - 23:04:19 PST