🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep11.194758.7442@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com> max@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com (Max Webb) writes:

>So I asked DC-2, "are you conscious?", and it replied "Why, yes,
>of course. In fact, I cannot be entirely physical". There followed
>an exposition much like the above. Lie detector tests indicated that
>it at least believed what it was saying. I took it apart - checked for
>ectoplasm - clean all over. I put it back together, rebooted -
>same result. 'functionally identical' donchaknow.
>
>I'm kind of stuck. It acts as if it had empathy for the feelings of others,
>acts like it experiences guilt when it fails those that count on it...
>So I guess I feel honor bound to treat it as conscious and alive, even
>though I can't prove it. Fact is, we have become fast friends, despite
>it's delusions about it's essentially dual nature.

Sure, I agree about all this.  Such a creature would certainly act
as if it were conscious, and I think it's very likely that it would
in fact be conscious.  I think that consciousness arises in virtue
of our functional organization.  However, the link between that
organization and consciousness is a contingent nomological relation,
rather than a logical one.

Our behaviour is probably explainably in physical/functional terms,
and our utterances about consciousness, the Mind/Body Problem, and
the like are certainly part of our behaviour, so they'll have a
physical/functional explanation.  But the problem of consciousness
isn't to explain the things we *say* about consciousness -- that's
relatively easy -- it's to explain consciousness itself.

See my old paper "Consciousness and Cognition", which is available
by ftp from cogsci.indiana.edu in pub/chalmers.consciousness.ps,
for a discussion of this very issue (although I no longer agree
with some of the things I say in that paper).  The issue raises a
lot of interesting problems, but in itself it can't be used as a
dismissal of the dualist position.

>It seems obvious to me that it is conscious, but some people would deny it.
>It is contingent on those people to provide some kind of demonstration
>of how the physical fact of it's construction could possibly logically
>entail the facts about unconsciousness. In virtue of what kind of
>physical properties is unconsciousness logically necessitated?

Not so.  The dualist needn't and shouldn't claim that the physical
facts entail that the machine is unconscious.  She need merely
claim that the physical facts leave the status of it's consciousness
logically undetermined.  The dualist can claim -- as I do -- that
such a machine would in fact be conscious, due to the nomic links
between consciousness and the functional.  The dualist can also
claim that the physical facts about such a system provide strong
inductive reasons for believing that it is conscious (especially
when such facts are taken in conjunction with the fact that I myself
am conscious).  But inductive justification falls far short of
logical necessity, which is what the materialist requires.

>So how do I go about trying to refute your theory?

Give me an idea of how the facts about consciousness are entailed
by the physical facts about a system.  Your attempt above consists
in pointing that such a system will act as if it's conscious -- but
acting as if one is conscious is clearly logically compatible with
the absence of consciousness.  So you'll have to do better than that.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."