Comment by jacquesm
3 years ago
The answer may well be 'consciousness is the ability to fake having consciousness well enough that another conscious being can't tell the difference' (which is the essence of the Turing test). Because if you're looking for a mechanism of consciousness you'd be hard put to pinpoint it in the 8 billion or so brains at your disposal for that purpose, no matter how many of them you open up. They'll all look like so much grisly matter from a biological point of view and like a very large neural net from a computational one. But you can't say 'this is where it is located and that is how it works'. Only some vague approximations.
Sure, and that’s what I’m trying to say. Is being conscience just fooling yourself and others really well or is there some new property that eventually emerges from large enough neural networks and sensory inputs? The philosophical zombie is one the most important existencial questions that we may be at the cusp of ignoring.
The philosophical zombie is fundamentally uninteresting as a conversational piece, as they are by definition indistinguishable from a "regular" person. For all we know, you could be one. You can speak of this concept until the end of time, just as you can with all things that cannot be measured or proven. It is a matter of faith.
Not really.
If you agree with Descartes that you can be sure of your own conscious, which is one leap of faith, and that it's more likely that the other entities you interact with are a result of evolution just as you, instead of a figment of your imagination (or someone else's), which is yet another leap, you're good to go. And that is the way most of us interpret the human experience.
Inquiring about the consciousness of an artificial entity requires a third leap, since it doesn't share our biological evolution. And it's probably a larger one, as we don't fully understand how we evolved it or what it actually is, really, that we're trying to replicate.
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Philosophical zombie is a nice way of putting it, I used the term 'articulate idiot' but yours is much more eloquent.
I'm not sure it is an answerable question though, today or possibly even in the abstract.
I wish it was, but it’s not mine :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
That’s the thing, if we truly understand conscience, we may have a shot at verifying if it’s answerable in the abstract. By simply replicating its effects, we are dodging the question.
Hello, not to be rude or anything, but please consider looking up the words “conscience”, “conscious” and “consciousness” in a dictionary and use the correct one for what you mean.
Hi, not a native speaker, thanks. The distinction between conscience (moral inner voice) and conscious (being aware of ones's existence) is not present in my mother tongue, if that's what you're referring to. Seems like an interesting english quirk.