> >"Does consciousness seem intrinsically subjective to me?"
>
> I musta missed something. I thought e-prime didn't allow 'e' to be used.
> Must be something else....
That's English-Prime. Doesn't allow English to be used. :-)
> >Now here's one I can answer!: yes. I can't verify consciousness in
> >anybody else, yet I'm sure *I* have it...
>
> I'm not. For what that's worth.
>
> Is a subjective sense of consciousness the thing itself? Is there a way
> out of that?
I'm not interested in infinite loops of awareness with no upper
bounds... I'm interested in our ability to look in a mirror and say...
"hey: that's me!"; or in our ability to think about our own thoughts, be
aware of our thoughts and actions... in short, our own awareness of
ourselves as just another actor on the stage of life.
I'm conscious. -- the very statement itself -- which has a reference to
"me" (ie I talk about myself in the third person) -- is a circular
"proof" of it's truth.
This is why I think consciousness must be *inherently* sujbective. We
can program a computer to output "I'm conscious", but that doesn't prove
it is... in short, we have absolutly no way of knowing whether or not a
computer (neural net, etc.) achieves consciousness... we would have to
take it's word on faith.
ERiC