Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote:
> Colin
> >That is the invisibility I claim at the center of
> > the zombie's difficulty.
>
> Brent
> But it will also present the same difficulty to the human scientist. An
> in fact it is easy to build a robot that detects and responds to radio
> waves that are completely invisible to a human scientist.
>
> Colin
> I'm not talking about invisibility of within a perceptual field. That is
> an invisibility humans can deal with to some extent using instruments. We
> inherit the limits of that process, but at least we have something
> presented to us from the outside world. The invisibility I speak of is the
> invisibility of novel behaviour in the natural world within a perceptual
> field.
To an entity without a phenomenal field, novel
behaviour will be phenomenally invisible. Everything
will be phenomenally invisible. That doesn't
mean they won't be able have non-phenomenal
access to events. Including novdl ones.
> Without a phenomenal representation of the external world we cannot
> use existing knowledge to predict anything 'out there' that we can
> reliably be surprised about. There is no 'out there' without phenomenal
> representation.
That's a claim -- that any projection from internal sense-data to a
hypothetical
external source is necessarily phenomenal -- not an argument.
> Brent:
> Are you saying that a computer cannot have any pre-programmed rules for
> dealing with sensory inputs, or if it does it's not a zombie.
>
> Colin:
> I would say that a computer can have any amount of pre-programmed rules
> for dealing with sensory inputs. Those rules are created by humans and
Yes.
> grounded in the perceptual experiences of humans.
Not necessarily. AI researches try to generalise as much as possible.
> That would be a-priori
> knowledge. The machine itself has no experiences related to the rules or
> its sensing, hence it is a zombie. The possession of behavioural rules
> does not entail zombie-ness. The lack of possession of perceptual fields
> does.
>
> Brent:
> Or are you claiming that humans have some pre-scientific knowledge that
> cannot be implemented in a computer.
>
> Colin:
> Yes! Humans have a genetically bestowed capacity to make cellular material
> which takes advantage of (as yet un-described) attributes of the natural
> world that enable sensory feeds to create phenomenal fields, thus
> connecting the human with the external natural world.
You pass easily from "humans are connected to the external
world phenomenally" to "no entity can be connected to the external
world except phenomenally".
> This is before any
> derived knowledge (scientific or not). So I suppose 'pre-scientific' is a
> good term for it. Innate a-priori knowledge (not learned or 'learned'
> during construction).
>
> I am saying that it cannot be computed. The experiences must be had. This
> does not preclude a different sort of chip that does have experiences
> because it replicates (not models) the actual physics of the phenomenal
> fields. This physics could be mixed into a computational substrate.
>
> So I'm saying that 'computing' grounded in perceptual fields is non-zombie.
> But we don't have that form of computing. We have numerical/symbolic
> models based on/grounded in human perception.
>
> cheers,
>
> Colin
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Received on Sat Nov 25 2006 - 11:57:05 PST