🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BuHEvo.9qC@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>In article <1992Sep12.034215.16017@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>
>>However it is quite possible that you have it backwards.  Experience
>>has shown true that the problem of  producing mechanized learning is
>>quite hard.  Once we have the right kind of learning, consciousness may
>>actually turn out to be much simpler than we think.
>
>Well, learning is a significant technical problem for AI and psychology,
>but it's not so much of a conceptual problem.  Learning is just a matter
>of having the right sort of causal organization in a system.

But perhaps that is true also of consciousness.

>                             Whereas with consciousness, even once we've
>unconvered all the causal chains in question -- once AI and psychology
>have done their work -- there will remain the further question of
>"why do those causal chains give rise to consciousness"?.

Perhaps so.  But I doubt it.  I suspece that once the causal chains are
known there will be little question as to what consciousness is.

>                                                           So, learning
>is a hard empirical problem, but consciousness is a deeper philosophical
>problem.

It is only deep because people make it deep by becoming mystical about
it.  Perhaps this is because they must use their consciousness to
investigate their consciousness, and this recursiveness becomes a
distraction.