Le 22-mai-05, à 06:29, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
> Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>>> 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.
>
>
> To be more strictly analogous with the situation for consciousness,
> what Jonathan could have said is that we have no idea what it is like
> to *be* a photon or to *be* a tree photosynthesising. Most people
> would say that photons and trees aren't conscious, and therefore they
> *can* be entirely understood from a 3rd person perspective. Perhaps
> this is true, but it is not logically consistent to say that it must
> be true and still maintain the 1st person/ 3rd person distinction we
> have been discussing. This is because the whole point of the
> distinction is that it is not possible to deduce or understand that
> which is special about 1st person experience (namely, consciousness)
> from an entirely 3rd person perspective. The aliens I have described
> in my example could be as different from us as we are different from
> trees, and they could easily conclude that an emulation of our minds
> is not fundamentally different from an emulation of our weather.
Which means we agree completely. I thought Jonathan, in the manner of
John Searle, was arguing that nothing in principle distinguishes a
phenomenon like consciousness and photosynthesis. And this is just a
traditional move made by the so-called elimininative materialists who
just pretend consciousness (and first person) does not exist. The error
they make, I think, comes from the fact that scientific discourses are
(by construction) made only in the 3-person manner. But nothing
prevents us to try (at least) to have some axiomatic of the first
person discourse and to make some 3-person statements about it. And
knowledge theory are like that. There is even a quasi-unanimity on the
basic axiom of knowledge "to know p entails p" (Cp -> p).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Sun May 22 2005 - 01:57:15 PDT