X-Message-Number: 12652 From: "John Clark" <> References: <> Subject: Once more, with feeling Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 12:00:03 -0400 In #12647 on Tue, 26 Oct 1999 Wrote: >>Me >>You said, without apparent embarrassment, that present day >>computers were intelligent, therefore I can say without embarrassment >>that present day computers are emotional, especially when there is >>not the slightest chance of my ever being proven wrong. >If there is "not the slightest chance" of his being proven wrong, then > his assertion is unfalsifiable and useless if not meaningless. Bingo, give that man a cigar! Statements of that sort are foolish and just as unfalsifiable and useless as your statement that computers do not have emotions. The entire train of thought is a dead end and that's why Kurzwell was wise in saying nothing about it in his book, there is nothing to say. >We can learn about the internal working of other minds in the same way >we learn about invisible subatomic particles--by experiment and inference. Exactly, and the Scientific Method still works even if the other mind is not made of meat. >It may also become possible one day, e.g. by some kind of electronic >"telepathy" to actually feel someone else's experiences at the same >time he does. You know for certain you experience emotions when you hook up to the telepathic machine, but the only reason you have for thinking that those emotions have anything to do with what I'm feeling is that some theory tells you it does, and that theory could only be produced by observing behavior. >Meanwhile--and what could be simpler, more obvious or more reasonable?--we >observe that other people behave much like us, and have anatomy/physiology >much like ours, hence they almost certainly have feelings similar to ours. We? Ours? They? Us? You have one and only one example, yourself. You can not form a coherent theory about anything, much less on how anatomy/physiology produce feelings, from one example and that's all you have.That's why behavior is so important in figuring out what's going on, other people behave like me so they probably feel like me. >I say there is no reason whatsoever to impute feeling to the thing If you can say a thermostat is intelligent I can say a thermostat is emotional, not that either statement is terribly useful. John K Clark Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=12652