From: swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Brain and Mind (was: Logic and God)
Date: 13 Oct 92 21:25:59 GMT
Reply-To: swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit

In article <1992Oct9.040228.2117@meteor.wisc.edu> tobis@meteor.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis) writes:
|In article <1992Oct8.230422.5045@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com> max@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com (Max Webb) writes:
|>We have pointed
|>out that this argument ignores one possibility of where consciousness
|>could lie, implicitly taking the conclusion of the argument as an
|>assumption. 
|
|It has become clear to me that, as Searle points out in his Scientific
|American article, that this "systems" argument is a dualist position,
|so it can't be advanced in the cause of materialism! (an odd mirror of
|what you accused me of, but to me it seems a valid point.)

Bah!  Then claiming that life is an emergent property of certain chemical
processes is a form of animism!

Emergence is merely the claim that for analysis to procede an additional
elevel of abstraction is necessary.  Microlevel analysis of neural
function does not reveal consciousness, it is the higher level *interactions*
of the nueral operations that do reveal it.  (No more than life is found
by studying the reaction of individual enzymes in a test tube).

|>Nevertheless, one response to your request goes: We are continuous with
|>the rest of the animal kingdom. You, for example claim cats are alive.
|>Simpler members of the animal kingdom have had their entire nervous systems
|>mapped out, and simulated, with _IDENTICAL_ behavior resulting.
|
|I claim precisely that behavior is not identical with consciousness.
|
|Furthermore, we are continuous with all of matter, but there is a mysterious
|discontinuity somewhere between ourselves and a virus, one side of which
|has an experience and the other side which doesn't. This phenomenon remains
|untouched by science, except as an observation that it does exist.

As a trained biologist (one of the few in this news group), I see *no*
such discontinuity.  Quite the contrary, I find no place where I can
identify any sharp break along the continuum from non-life to human life.

There is no capability in humans that is not echoed, at least in part, by
some capability in another animal.  There are no neural components, or
processes in humans that do have corresponding aspects in other animals.

|> This is
|>exactly the kind of progress you claim will be impossible in humans. Now,
|>spirits have been historically claimed to dwell in all living things,
|>for reasons and intuitions like the ones you present to us. But where we
|>can check, there is no such thing. Therefore, the credibility of the
|>claim where we CAN'T yet check is weakened.
|
|I suspect that the verification is on the other side of the discontinuity, but
|in any case behavior is not consciousness.

It sounds like there is nothing you would accept as evidence of consciousness.
If so, I doubt you will ever accept anything other than humans as conscious.

This could be a problem for you when the Galactic Federaion finally gets
around to sending its ambassador to Earth! (:-))

Really, the issue at hand is how to recognize non-human consciousness.
It is no different in principle in the case of space aliens than it is with
computers.

In neither case do we have access to thier subjective experience, so we must
rely on external data to determine its presence.

So, what *evidence* would you require to accept a being from another planet
was conscious?  How would you distinguish a 'real' aliem from a perfect
'android' type robot?  (For that matter, is the distinction even meaningful)?

-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com