X-Message-Number: 17934 Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 23:21:32 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Consciousness Thing Charles Platt, #17916, writes: >... >I suggest that consciousness is nothing more than an additional routine >that simulates the personal effects of alternative actions, and chooses >accordingly Basically my feeling too. >This would be very easy to simulate. I agree. >By these criteria, my cat is certainly conscious. Last year, after a >6-inch snowfall, my cat went out for a quick walk. Later in the day, when >he wanted to go out again, he paused in the doorway and surveyed the snow, >which was marked with his own deep footprints. Very carefully, he walked >out, placing his paws precisely in the previous footprints, thus >minimizing his discomfort from contact with fresh snow. To me, this was >clearly a conscious decision, derived after imagining the consequences if >he created fresh tracks instead of following old ones. A fine example, and something I think would be well within the ability of today's technology to do with a robot cat, in a way that avoided obviously simplistic approaches and really required some judgment and ability to anticipate. So we could argue that the robot too would be conscious. >The final, insuperable problem in the "consciousness" debate is that any >entity can claim to be conscious, and you have no way to refute this. In some cases an ad-hoc argument would be offered, e.g. for a simple computer program that answers "Yes, you bet!" if you type "Are you conscious?" but can't do much else. But we can imagine a very sophisticated program that really simulates a brain and does a good job. Let's say it uses technology we don't have yet, but are likely to have in the future. Though entirely nonbiological it can talk just like a human (perhaps it is embedded in a robot with voice and other capabilities) and has structures that correspond to the parts of the human brain that activate when it is functioning. It says it feels pleasure and pain and so on, and seems in every way to have human emotions, except that, once again, it is made of nonbiological material. Is it conscious or just faking it? I submit there is no way in principle to answer this question, beyond the thought that it is a definitional question. You have to decide what you mean by consciousness, and it isn't sufficient to just say that if the entity in question has "awareness" and "feeling" then it is conscious. In an important sense you can never know this. My feeling is that I can't think of a good reason for *not* regarding something like this as conscious, so I would accept it as such. Corollary: I wouldn't worry if my brain were about to be replaced by an artificial, inorganic device that in other ways was equivalent, if it offered certain advantages such as greater durability or memory backups. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=17934