Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> Brent Meeker writes (quoting SP):
>
>
>>> A lot of the stuff criticising Chalmer's thesis is quite strident, at least by the usual
>>> academic> > standards. It's not quite as severe as the reaction to Roger Penrose's theories
>>> on the mind, but> > almost. Many cognitive scientists seem to take anything not clearly
>>> straightforward materialism> > as automatically false or even nonsense. I sympathise with
>>> them to a degree: I think we should> > push materialism and reductionism as far as we can.
>>> But the inescapable fact remains, I could> > know every empirical fact about a conscious
>>> system, but still have no idea what it is actually> > like to *be* that system, as it were
>>> from the inside.> > That's commonly said, but is it really true? Even without knowing
>>> anything about another person's > brain you have a lot ideas about what it is like to be that
>>> person. Suppose you really knew a lot > about an artificial brain, as in a planetary probe
>>> for example, and you also knew a lot about your > own brain and to you could compare
>>> responses both at the behavioural level and at the "brain" level. > I think you could infer
>>> a lot about what it was like to be that probe. You just couldn't directly > experience its
>>> experiences - but that's not surprising.
>
>
> You have an idea of what it is like to be another person because you are one yourself. A
> completely alien being might actually know more about how a human brain works than any human,
> even to the extent where he could manufacture a fully working and conscious brain, but he would
> not necessarily have any idea at all about what it is like to be a human unless by accident his
> own mind turned out to be similar to ours - and even then he couldn't be sure.
That's simply an assumption. When we know how to make a conscious brain we may find that we do have
a good idea of what it experiences - as evidenced by its self-reports and other behavoir.
>On the other hand,
> if you know every empirical fact about a non-conscious entity well enough to make an exact
> working replica, then you know everything there is to know about it. We could define
> consciousness as what is left over when you subtract what can be known about an entity by an
> external observer from what can be known by being that entity yourself.
If there is anything left over. I don't think it is sufficiently appreciated that this
"unknowability" is an assumption.
Brent Meeker
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Received on Fri Jul 21 2006 - 11:53:17 PDT