Le 21-mai-05, à 08:31, Jonathan Colvin a écrit :
> Stathis:
>
>> People certainly seem to take their consciousness seriously
>> on this list!
>> I've now managed to alienate both the "consciousness doesn't
>> really exist"
>> and the "it exists and we can explain it" factions. I did not
>> mean that there is no explanation possible for consciousness.
>> It is likely that in the course of time the neuronal
>> mechanisms behind the phenomenon will be worked out and it
>> will be possible to build intelligent, conscious machines.
>> Imagine that advanced aliens have already achieved this
>> through surreptitious study of humans over a number of
>> decades. Their models of human brain function are so good
>> that by running an emulation of one or more humans and their
>> environment they can predict their behaviour better than the
>> humans can themselves. Now, I think you will agree (although
>> Jonathan Colvin may not) that despite this excellent
>> understanding of the processes giving rise to human conscious
>> experience, the aliens may still have absolutely no idea what
>> the experience is actually like.
>
> No, I'd agree that they have no idea what the experience is like. But
> this
> is no more remarkable than the fact that allthough we may have an
> excellent
> understanding of photons, we can not travel at the speed of light, or
> that
> although we may have an excellent understanding of trees, yet we can
> not
> photosynthesize. Neither of these "problems" seem particularly hard.
But we can photosynthesize. And we can understand why we cannot travel
at the speed of light. All this by using purely 3-person description of
those phenomena in some theory.
With consciousness, the range of the debate goes from non-existence to
only-existing. The problem is that it seems that an entirely 3-person
explanation of the brain-muscles relations evacuates any purpose for
consciousness and the 1-person. That's not the case with
photosynthesis.
Bruno
>
> Jonathan Colvin
>
>
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Sat May 21 2005 - 09:54:53 PDT