From: tycchow@riesz.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: None.  This saves me from writing a disclaimer.
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 92 16:45:52 GMT

I must admit that I am rather surprised at the objections raised to my
lookup table.  They aren't the ones I was expecting.  I thought about it a
bit more and came up with something that perhaps will circumvent to some
extent the objections raised by Merriman and Rickert.

Superintelligent aliens land on earth and, suppressing snickers, present
mankind with a black box that takes typewritten input and outputs
typewritten messages.  The aliens ask us to try to figure out whether or
not the black box is conscious.  So the world's cleverest people come and
try asking the box different questions and offering various typewritten
messages to feed it.  After several years of intensive experimentation,
the human beings come to the aliens.

Humans: Well, if it wasn't just a black box, we'd swear there was a human
        being trapped inside.  It's described to us life support systems
        inside the box, and its life before you guys captured it, its
        feelings of loneliness, poems that it's written, songs it knows---
        everything.  It certainly passes the Turing test.  We're inclined
        to say that it's conscious.
Aliens (guffawing): Oh, really?  Well, as a matter of fact, the black box is
        just a lookup table!  What do you think of THAT?
Humans: But that's impossible!  Physics tells us that [blah blah blah].
Aliens (smirking): Ah, yes, you human beings are still at that very
        primitive stage where you haven't discovered the domains where
        relativity and quantum mechanics fail.  Well, we've surmounted
        those piddling "physical limitations," and I can assure you that
        the black box is a lookup table.  We can spend a few centuries
        teaching you the physics behind it if you like...

How might we respond?

1. Well, who cares if it's a lookup table?  It passes the Turing test, so
   for all intents and purposes it's conscious.
2. Hmm...I guess we've been fooled.  If it's just a lookup table then it
   can't be conscious.  I guess consciousness is a further fact beyond
   what can be probed with a Turing test.
3. Hmmm...I guess we've been fooled.  If it's just a lookup table then it
   can't be conscious.  But we were fooled because all we could do was
   exchange typewritten messages with it.  We couldn't take it out to
   dinner, or hit it over the head, or give it perfume to smell.  And we
   couldn't examine its internal structure.  If we could do all that then
   we wouldn't make a mistake about its consciousness.

Responses 1 and 3 were what I expected from the physicalists reading this
group.  I guess I should emphasize again that my purpose in citing this
example is to ILLUSTRATE the kinds of intuitions that might lead one to
argue for dualism.  If it doesn't awaken the appropriate intuitions, then
forget the example.
-- 
Tim Chow     tycchow@math.mit.edu
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
only 1 1/2 tons.                               ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949