X-Message-Number: 12589
From: 
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 12:07:47 EDT
Subject: imputing feeling

Mike Perry (#12588) asks what would constitute evidence that a system has 
feelings, or subjective experiences.

The answer is that we must look for anatomy/physiology (or possibly, but not 
necessarily, an analog) that we have reason to believe is associated with 
feeling. We won't know what this might be until we identify it in mammals. I 
have suggested that the "self circuit" might be some kind of modulated 
standing wave in the nervous system. 

As Mike concedes, it doesn't help to impute feeling just by 
anthropromorphizing. You could say that a compass "wants" to point north, or 
that hot air "likes" to rise, but clearly that is misleading, and equally so 
to say that a robot that seeks an electric outlet, to recharge itself, is 
"hungry." 

To hammer this point a bit more--and the dieters will understand this--a 
person is not "hungry" because he seeks or needs food, or even because he 
says he is hungry; he is hungry because a particular sensation arises in his 
brain, whether or not he seeks or needs food, and regardless of what he may 
say. 

Externally observed behavior is NOT everything; this is the fact that so many 
refuse to face.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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