🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep18.152300.9596@oracorp.com> daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough) writes:
>In article <sd1nyvn.kmc@netcom.com>, kmc@netcom.com (Kevin McCarty)
>writes:
>
>>>Not that this contradicts your point (you did say "most of us"), but I
>>>*do* think that the giant lookup table is conscious. Only most of its
>>>thinking is done at compile-time, rather than run-time.
>
>> conscious of what, when, I wonder.  Doesn't this do strange things to
>> any notion of consciousness as situated in psychological time?  More
>> than anything else, this puts me in mind of ghosts.
>
>Psychological time need not coincide with real time. When you dream,
>there is a psychological time that gives a subjective sense of the
>ordering and duration of events. However, as I understand it,
>objectively the entire dream can take place in the few moments before
>waking up. I don't think it is especially meaningful to ask at what
>objective time did such and such an event happen in your dream; as far
>as we know, the various parts of the dream could have formed in your
>brain simultaneously or in the wrong order in objective time.
>
>I don't see any problem with the assumption that a computer program
>(even one as simple as a lookup table) might have a subjective notion
>of the time at which various thoughts or sensations took place, which
>might be in complete contrast with the objective times for the
>corresponding thoughts.

Um, well, maybe my coffee cup is conscious, only most of its thinking
was done in the warehouse where no one could see it.  (You will remember
this coffee cup, I think.)

What you usually say about this is that in the case of the Table
Lookup Machine we have the evidence of its behavior, whereas the
coffee cup just sits there.  But the TLM behavior makes it look
like the thinking is happening as we talk to it, not at compile time.

That you are willing to allow that things can be so different from
what the behavior indicates is something I have to regard as a
tremendous victory for the anti-behavior side.

-- jd