At 07:41 PM 1/5/99 +0000, Robin Faichney wrote:
>Depends for what purpose. For practical purposes, yes,
>of course I'm alive. But am I *really* alive? Can't
For practical purposes, of course we are conscious. See?
>say, because the word isn't sufficiently well defined.
My point is you can say exactly the same thing about most categories we use on a regular basis. For most people that is not a showstopper.
>I agree "conscious" and "alive" are similar in some
>ways. But it seems we disagree on whether the
>question "could a machine really be conscious" is a
>practical or a theoretical one. It seems obviously
>the latter, to me, but apparently not to you.
I see it as both a practical question and a theoretical one. I don't think there is anything magical about consciousness. Therefore it is necessarily a natural phenomenon. If so, then is it something about the human-particular implementation of thought processes that gives rise to consciousness (something about the physical makeup of our neurons)? Then perhaps machines can't be conscious, unless they are built of the same kind of meat. But it seems more likely that it is something about the information processing, independent of the hardware. Sort of like how temperature (heat) arises from the motion of molecules, maybe consciousness arises from the motion of thoughts.
-- David McFadzean david@lucifer.com Memetic Engineer http://www.lucifer.com/~david/ Church of Virus http://www.lucifer.com/virus/