Re: A request for information please.

Stephen Harris <cyberguard-1048@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Curt Welch wrote:
Stephen Harris <cyberguard-1048@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Curt Welch wrote:
Stephen Harris <cyberguard-1048@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Curt Welch wrote:

I'm not interested in your define
consciousness game. I believe in my first person experience.



Ok, good. Lets talk about "first person experience". What exactly do
you think that is? Show me the data to explain what you are talking
about please.


It is what I experience and believe to be true. It is similar to what
I see and believe to exist. No two people see the same tree but people
are still able to come to a consensus about what the word "tree" refers
to. The tree is external and consciousness internal but they are both
experienced by me and my sense of self which is related enough to the
sense of consciousness which I experience when I wake from sleep.

I agree for the most part with Dennett's essay in the book "Sweet
Dreams" called "A Third-Person Approach to Consciousness". Discussing
consciousness requires a lot of typing and I'm no longer interested
in the question(s) you pose related to consciousness. I no longer
care much about the "Other Mind" problem.

I'm not required to show you data in the First person experience of
consciousness. People reach agreement about its existence by relating
to their own first person experience which is correlated by public
description and context.

Well, I think you have basically answered the question above in what you
write here.

I'm not sure why you added "believe to be true" however. If I happen to be
seeing things which I don't believe to be true, I'm still having a real
experience. So that seems to me to qualify for the idea of first person
experience.

What's very true is that we make large assumptions that since humans are so
similar, our experiences must be similar, so anything we sense, the natural
first assumption is that other people probably experience things in a very
similar way.

It's also very easy to assume that things very different from us, like a
rock, or a computer, will have a very different experience.

What I can't agree with, is when this basic idea of what it's like to be
human, is assumed to be limited to humans, and that other things, such a
robots, couldn't have _any_ of the same sorts of experience. There's just
no evidence to support the idea that we are unique. The evidence only
suggests that we are unique directly in relation to the uniqueness of our
physical features. WE have neurons, our digital computers don't. We have
light sensors, the computers have light sensors. etc. We have a lot in
common with robots, and we have a lot different. This leaves us with only
one logical answer to our similarity to computers - we have some
difference, and we have some similarities.

If you want to use the word "consciousness" to encapsulate everything that
it is like to be human, it's damn near impossible to not pick up some of
the features of the robot we share - like the ability to see a red apple
and know we are looking at a red apple. But yet, many here seem to assume
that our feature set holds nothing in common with robots. This is the
position that I feel can't be defended and the one that drives me up the
wall when people say that humans are conscious and robots and other
machines have no consciousness. It's a position which just can't be
defined. It's only a position which can be believed in by faith.

Your request for data is part of the Second Person approach to
verify consciousness, not the first, which I used because I don't
care to defend or assume the burden of a Second Person verification.

If there is no way to perform second person verification, how can you
verify that you have it in yourself? Why isn't self verification the same
as second person verification?

If I want to verify I have two hands, I have to turn my sensory system
towards my hands. If I want to verify you have two hands, I have to turn
my sensory system towards your hands. It's the same procedure whether I'm
testing my hands, or your hands. If I want to test if you have some
property which we call consciousness, I have to turn my sensory system
towards you. If I want to test if I a property of consciousness, I have to
direct my sensory system towards me. I don't really see that there's an
important difference between whether I'm verifying the condition of myself,
or verifying the connection of you.

main many difference, is that I have neurons in my had which I use as part
of my sensory system. And they are already connected to other neurons in
my head - so they are the instrument I'm using to verify that my other
neurons are working correctly. I don't have an easy way to connect them to
the neurons in your head so I can verity your neurons are working
correctly. So the problem of me verifying our neurons are working
correctly becomes a difficult one for practical reasons, but not a a
difficult one for philosophical reasons.

Now, the above idea is all logical if you are physicalist. If you believe
in the possibility of some form of dualism, then we run into the
philosophical problem.

I'm not interested in this. I am content to discuss issues with those
who already believe that the convenience of terms like mind is useful.

I have no problem with the word mind. I have HUGE problems with people who
believe that only humans have them. There is nothing about our mind, that
doesn't seem to exist in some forms in our current robots, and in our
current chess programs, and in all our current computers.

To me, the word mind simply means "brain" - or maybe, the operation of the
brain which we can sense but that others around us can't sense. This is
how most people seem to use the word. If that is what they mean, I have no
problem with it.

Please outline the experiment I could perform on a human to find out if
that human was having this thing you call first person experience. Or
outline an experiment I can do on myself to find out if I have this
thing you call first person experience.


It is the sense of your existence. If you don't experience yourself
then I am content for you to believe you don't exist. Have I missed
something? Where is the requirement for personal experience to have
to be validated by another?

The reason I'm asking is not because I'm confused about what it is for
humans. It's because I'm pissed off at the people who pretend they know
things about the minds of non-humans when they haven't even stopped to try
and figure out why humans have minds and what a human mind is. They will
call me an idiot for suggesting that our machines already have minds, but
yet they have no evidence to suggest what the machine has or doesn't have.
They have no physical definition of what the human mind is, or where it
comes from, they have no way to test for it, in human, or non-humans, but
yet they pretend that it's obvious that our current computers don't have
any type of mind and that anyone such as I, who suggests they do, is just
an idiot.

If all you know about the mind, is that it's the private behaviors we sense
happening which others can't sense - or the cause of those private
behaviors, then we can assume for many reasons that others humans have a
similar mind. But we can't assume anything about what other machines do,
or don't have, since their behavior is so different from ours (we can't
even have a discussion with them about these questions).

If you want to define "mind" as "human-level private behavior" then sure,
our current computers don't have that type of mind. We don't' have any
computers that can produce the typical range of thoughts and memories a
human will have. But when I suggested to people that were trying to argue
that computers don't have any sort of mind, or any sort of consciousness
that they were simply choosing to defined mind as human-level mind, they
refused to bite. They just run back to the basic position that only humans
have minds and machines have nothing like that.

I can look at my desk and see a computer. "I" know that "I" am looking
at a computer. Is that the first person experience you are talking
about?


Yes, either that or a frightfully good simulation.

How is this any different from a robot with image recognition software
that is able to look at the same view of a desk, and also known that it
is looking at a computer? It can know it's looking at a computer
without

You don't know the answer to this question? I don't that a computer can
know anything in the same sense as a human, I've never endorsed all
those anthropomorphic terms projected onto a computer/program.

And this is one of the foundations of my frustration. We as humans, have
made up a *** load of words to talk about human behavior. And, because we
made up the words for the purpose of talking about humans, it's a socially
accepted fact that those words should not be used to talk about non humans.
The words have an implied meaning of "human performing behavior". If you
use them to describe a car, you have misused the word. You have implied
you are talking about a human when you are not. This is all well and good.

At the same time, these words have been around for thousands of years. But
only recently, in the past 50 or so years, have we started to build
machines that have powers approaching the powers of the very interesting
and complex human machine. So only recently, have the machines started to
duplicate some of the same powers.

Now, for example, we talk about humans "knowing" things. This is one of
the many words that for thousands of years, could only be applied to humans
because no other machines came close to being able to duplicate the type of
behavior we call "knowing" in humans. But now we have lots of machines
that duplicate most of the behaviors in humans. I can ask Google to tell
the URL of web sites that have my name on it. It can tell me these things
because I knows the answer. But yet, we shy away from believing that the
Google computers actually "know" the same way we do. Though we might talk
as if they known things, many people still assume that they don't actually
work at all like humans.

But why is this? Is it because they don't work like humans? Is it because
what they are doing is fundamentally very different than what a human does
when a human answers a question? Or is it because we have been conditioned
by our language to assume that "knowing" is something that only a human can
do?

What I sense happening, is that people resist the idea that computers can
known like a human can known, because they have been conditioned to think
that way by our language. Our language has tons of words that only apply
to human behavior. If we see the same behavior in a non-human, we are not
allowed to use the same label for it (by strong social convention). We say
that humans answer questions using their knowledge. They do it with the
their own free will and may choose not to answer. Computers on the other
hand are just running a fixed computer program that forces them to do what
they do. We say that don't have knowledge, but that instead, they are just
programmed to do what they do. They have no free will.

But to me, all this is just wrong. People that want to understand what a
human actually is, and what they share in common with our machines, so we
can understand what type of machine we are, need to stop letting themselves
by biased by the social conventions of our language. Just because it's
socially wrong to say a computer has knowledge, doesn't mean that what
computers do is different than what humans do.

I have other reasons besides behavior to assume other humans have minds.
We share the same evolution which merges the range of our capabilities.
This is the simplest assumption.

Yes, I have no problem with that.

To claim some machine has consciousness
without human structure requires additional assumption of functionalism.

When I say machines are conscious, I currently don't mean they have a level
of awareness and a level of behavior that equals any human. What I'm
trying to argue is that the things people point to in humans when they talk
about our consciousness, seems to already exist at some lower level, in our
computers. So if you point our ability to see a red apple as part of what
it means to be conscious, then I don't see how you can't understand that
computers already have this feature as well. For the most part, as far as
I can tell, everything that humans have, which we point to when we talk
about our consciousness, computers already have. The only thing they seem
to be lacking, is our level of complexity with these powers.

There's not a single one of those human-specific behavior words that I
can't already point to some computer or robot and show you examples of the
same behavior in our robots.

But, when I try to do this to help people understand that we aren't as far
away as many assume, many people reject the suggestion. But when I try to
understand why they are rejecting it, the main thing that seems to be their
motivation for rejecting it is because they are well conditioned by society
to not use words like "knowing" when talking about non-humans. And this
conditioning in them seems to have surfaced as a "belief" that machines
can't "know".

The people that can't get past this confusion seem to be the people who
haven't spent much time trying to figure out exactly what properties a
machine must have before it can know something. Or exactly what properties
a machine must have before it can feel something, or be aware of
something.

The intellectualism involved in asking questions like, How do I know I
exist, no longer appeals to me as requiring any answer; it's not real.

That's not a question that every held in any interest for me. But the
variation of it which holds much interest to me, is what type of machine
does it take to be aware that things exist? What type of machine are we
that we can sense that things, as well as ourselves, exist?

reporting the fact externally (it can just record it in its memory with
a time stamp ("I saw a computer at 7:32 pm")). Or it can choose to
tell us by speaking the words, "I see a computer".

Are you suggesting that this ability I have to recognize an image as
being a computer and remember it without telling anyone or choosing to
report it externally is something I have, but computers don't have?

No, but that must be your idea of consciousness, not mine, I think the
program would need self-reference, self-awareness, -> a self-symbol.
Apparently you've mentioned what you think I think serve as determinants
for consciousness. I think computer programs can do many things, perhaps
in their own way, that humans can do, but this is not how I measure if
an "entity" has consciousness; behavior is one of your assumptions.

If this is not an example of the thing you call first person
experience, what is? How do we test for this stuff you call first
person experience so I can know whether or not I am a zombie. What do
we have to tell the computer so it can test itself to see if it is a
zombie?


A computer cannot have first person experience without some major
conjectures which Computationalism typically provides. Again your
questions about tests are Second Person attempts at validation,
not First Person experience which does not require a test.

I don't think that follows. I think it presupposes that a conscious person
is a single entity, instead of a machine made up of many different parts.
If it's a single entity (like the view we might take if we believe in the
soul), then it either knows it exists or it doesn't. There's no way to
break it down further. It would make no sense for one part of the system
having knowledge of the other part of the system.

I don't however believe that's what humans are. I believe we are machines
with many parts and the act of "knowing" is not something that happens as a
single event for a single part. I believe that when we talk about
something like knowing, we are just talking about the complex behaviors of
a complex machine with many parts.

How for example do we know there's an apple in front of us? We know it
because we have sensors to turn the light into signals in our nervous
system, and because we have a brain which is processing those signals and
ultimately detecting that they represent the form of an apple, and after
that, the system produces different reactions (aka behaviors) to this
recognized stimulus condition (we might reach for it to eat it, or just
have the thought in our head, hey I wonder why that apple is there, etc).

All of this stuff combined - the operation of many different parts of the
body and brain, is what we call "knowing the apple is there". This is what
we mean by "knowing the apple exists".

So what does it mean to be self aware? It means that we know we exist as a
human. Knowing that we exist is no different than knowing that an apple
exists. It just comes with the added information that the thing doing the
"knowing" is in this case also the subject of what is known.

We known we exist because we have sensors that can detect that our body
exists, and we have the power to reject in complex ways to those
sensations. But our reaction to an apple, or to ourselves, is the combined
behavior of billions of atoms each doing their part in the process. I see
no mystery to the act of being self aware at all. I see it as nothing more
surprising or complex than a camera which is able to take a picture of
itself.

Humans react is much more interesting ways to their environments than a
camera does, and we react in much more interesting ways to ourselves than a
camera reacts to itself. So sure, the total interaction of human self
awareness is far more interesting than camera self awareness. But it's no
more mystical or special. It's just more complex.

So what is first person experience other than a device which is able to be
aware of itself? And how in this universe, is it possible for a device to
be aware of itself, and for that type of awareness to any different than
when the device is aware of parts of the universe which are not itself?

In the end, devices are aware of the universe (at least the parts which it
has sensors to sense) and because the device happens to be part of the
universe at the same time, it can't help be we self aware.

But if two devices have the power to be aware of the universe, and two
devices are part of the universe, they are both aware of each other. Why,
for these devices, is the awareness of self, different than the awareness
of the other? Why for example should we think of a camera which takes a
picture of itself doing something different than a camera which is talking
a picture of another camera? I see no reason to support a view that
suggests self awareness is a fundamentally different process than general
awareness.

But yet, you talk as if there is a fundamental difference between first
person experience and second person validation of first person experience.
I believe you (and many others) see the world like this because of the fact
that we have private behaviors which we can sense, but others can not. This
gives us something special about us, which makes us different from others.
I can sense this stuff in me, but you can't. This is where all this belief
in the special nature of self awareness I believe comes from. I have a
special power of self awareness because I can sense what I'm thinking, and
you can't. And I can't sense what you are thinking, but you can.

However, the only reason this is true, is the same reason a camera can't
take a picture of another camera, if the second camera is located in a
different room. I can't sense what you are thinking, only because my brain
is not wired to your brain. If however, I had a very good brain scanner
which could sense what your brain was doing, and in turn, inject those
thoughts into my brain by activating different brain sections, I think I
could sense exactly what you were thinking. And I believe there is noting
other than having the correct technology available to us to make such a
think happen. There are no laws of nature that seem to support the idea
that it is impossible for me to sense the behavior of your brain.

In other words, I don't believe this whole idea that 1st person experience
being fundamentally different than 2nd person experience makes much sense
at all.

It does make sense that if you have two rocks, and you scratch one of them,
only one of them had direct experience of the scratch. At best the second
one could only know that that first was scratched. But when we talk about
first person experience we are talking about more than that. We are
talking about the rock being aware that it was scratched. Or to get away
from rocks because this seems to confuse people, we are talking about being
aware that we see an apple, instead of just seeing and responding to an
apple. And I believe we can be aware of our own actions, in the exact same
way as we are aware of someone else's actions.

Now, to start me on all this rambling, you said,

> A computer cannot have first person experience without some major
> conjectures which Computationalism typically provides.

I agree that we are making major conjectures when we talk about computer
awareness. But at the same time, I believe we have to make even larger
conjectures to try and argue the position that computers don't have any
type of first person experience.

It's true that we start from a basic I know I exist and I know I have some
basic self attributes, and then extend those to other humans for obvious
reasons. And I know that its' hard to extend to something so different
from us like a computer for obvious reasons that we are so different. And
500 years ago, that would have been the end of the story. The belief in
the body holding a soul which give us life and created our behavior was a
fine theory based on what was known then.

Now however, physics, and chemistry, and biology and neuroscience has
advanced to the point of showing us that we are in fact very similar, and
that computers have more in common with humans than we have differences.
We all made up of the same atoms - we are the same stuff. And all atoms
work the same way - they are all act according to the laws of physics. And
chemistry and biology has made it more than clear that the body is nothing
but a large complex machine made out of the same stuff (atoms) that all
machines are made out of. There's no more room left to believe in the
magic of a non physical soul which gives us life and is the source of our
behavior. The source of our behavior is the atoms we are made up of and
nothing else. To argue for something else is now the extraordinary claim
that needs extraordinary proof.

At this point, if we talk about humans having properties like
consciousness, and first person experience, we need to translate those
words into the words of physics, because physics is all there is here in
the human body - the rest of science has made that abundantly clear at this
point and to not accept that is to be making an extraordinary claim in this
day and age.

And even if you have not yet figured out how to translate word like
"consciousness" and "first person experience" into the words of physics,
you shouldn't be surprised when someone who has spent a lot of time trying
to figure out how to do that, suggests that a machine (also made of atoms
and also directed by the same laws of nature that the human body must
follow) is said to have some of the same properties as a human body and a
human brain.

Would this test also tell us if I am conscious? Can the computer use
the same test so it can tell us if it is conscious? Or is this just a
test to see if we have a mind, and consciousness is something
different? How do we test for that? How does the computer test to see
if it is conscious - I'm sure it wants to know as much as we do. :)

Nothing I've written extends the First Person experiential stance to
objects. "I believe in my first person experience." I don't need to
test it.

And I don't have any issue with that view. I only take issue when people
say that they know a given machine has no such experience when they have no
evidence to conclude that. All they know, is the machine is different from
them in many substantial ways. But without a way to test a machine for
what they call first person experience, they have no real evidence one way
or the other if machines have some sort of similar experience.

How do I know I exist? I am content with the old answer of
I think, therefore I am. I don't know how humans can know if a program
is aware, which I've repeated before. I don't know how a computer can
be aware of itself, I suppose if it has consciousness. I don't know
of any test to determine whether a computer has consciousness.

It all comes down to first figuring out just what we are talking about when
we talk about how we know things and how we are aware etc. To solve AI, we
have to figure out what this is all about.

We don't need any evidence to conclude what we exist or that we are aware
or that we know things. But when we try to extend these concepts to
anything but a human, we have to use whatever evidence we have to work with
to make the best guess we can.

The first evidence is that the machines are very different from us in many
ways, so the first guess is that they don't have the same type of
awareness. But that's where the first guess ends. We then look for more
complete data about what a human is, and what we are actually making
reference to when we talk about these human things, we get a much better
idea about what we have been talking about all along. We get a much better
idea about what a human actually is - and more important, what the brain is
doing and what the "mind" is.

The only way to argue that machines don't have some level of consciousness,
is to ignore all the science we have available to us, and use nothing but
our gut instincts driven by nothing other than the fact that machines don't
yet talk to us about their awareness, and that their structure is very
different.

What I'm sure is going to happen here is that there is no such test you
can specify. And that any such test you can even suggest to get us
close to an answer, I can show you how our current computers can
already pass the same test.

Well, you are half right. I know I exist have consciousness, awareness,
mind, etc because I experience myself, but I don' think of that as a
test. I am able to relate my first person experience. You however, can
not relate first person experience for a machine/program, so you can
never "show" me that, the best you can do is speculate on whether
machines/programs have personal experience and what constitutes such
an experience. I don't infer my consciousness/awareness from my
behavior, I experience it in First Person.

I think what you are calling "experience it" is behavior. But that's
another issue really.

Your questions have all
been Second Person and that is not my concern, or rather, I don't
want to spend time on a long never ending debate.

This leaves me wondering why you ask so many questions about a
mind, when you don't even know what it is you are talking about? And
the more you try to define it, and the more I show you that everything
you try to give as an example, is something our computers already do
like humans, the closer you might come to understand my position - that
you can't even build a dumb robot which doesn't have a "mind" let alone
build one that's so advanced that it can pass a strong Turing test.


It is a good thing that I don't worry about defining it, or proving
it. I and others I discuss mind with take it as a given which operates
as many other concepts do, agreement by consensus.

And as long as you limit your scope to humans, that works fine. Where it
fails, if you try to make any statement about non-humans. To do this, we
must find other tools and other logical to justify our beliefs (or simply
not justify them and believe whatever we feel like believing).

So please, explain to me how to test for a mind, and how to test for
first person experience so we can all be sure exactly what you are
talking about when you use these words. Once we are all sure exactly
what you are talking about, then we can get back to answering your
question about the Turing test and the "mind" and why Don and I have
said the type of things we have said about that.


"I believe in my first person experience." I don't know that one
can test for everything one experiences. I've certainly never made
that claim,

Well, if we are nothing but a pile of atoms reacting with each other and
with the atoms in the rest of the universe (which I certainly believe),
then "experience" is just the movement of atoms. And the movement of atoms
can very much be tracked and verified through means other than first person
experience. More importantly, atoms can't really even have first person
experience. Which gets back to what I was saying above when I suggested
that what you call first person experience is really 2nd person experience
of ourselves.

so I have no obligation to provide you with a test for
mind because I'm not sure one exists. Tests and external validation
as you might expect from their labels, belong to Second and Third
Person approaches to establishing consciousness. Nor do I need to
establish the usage of terms like consciousness/mind for those who
freely use such terms without social duress or out of consideration
for the ignorance of others (in your estimation). I don't use those
terms as an offer to educate people about their meaning, but in a
context of participating in communication with others in an already
largely agreed upon vocabularly. You were the one who participated
in a post where those terms were already employed. Claiming ignorance
now of whether they actually have meaning and asking for a definition
removes you from my request for clarification of how your response
explained those 'instantiates a mind' questions contained in that
post. That doesn't mean I feel any ambition to explain your questions.
I am no longer interested in this fundamental level of philosophy,
definition of vocabulary, that you are curious about. Your crusade
to bring enlightenment will not engage me.

Ok, my point of asking you to explain mind is duplicated in this tact I'm
taking in multiple posts on these related subject.

For you, you have asked how or why I believe that a machine that can pass
the Turing test must have a mind. I explained it was a result that
followed naturally from a physicalist view, but didn't follow from a
dualist view. But since I don't believe dualism is real in this universe -
I believe it's just what many people believe in - I don't consider it a
valid possibility. So since I only believe physicalism is valid, I only
answer the questions based on what I believe to be true.

My physicalist view has forced me to try and answer the question of what
physical things are happening in the brain to explain all the stuff we talk
about under the heading of consciousness. I've found answers to all that
which I happen to believe in. I don't even see it is speculation. I see
it as the obvious and only truth. So I don't talk about it as if it were
just a working thesis I might have (even though technically it must be
since I haven't proved it to be true).

My belief is quite simple. I've put it forth many many times in these
posts. I believe the human brain which creates all our conscious behavior
is nothing more than a fairly simple stimulus reaction machine which is
constantly being reconfigured by a process we can describe as conditioning,
or reinforcement learning. It operates as a large network of mostly
independent processing units which as a whole, receives a constant stream
of parallel stimulus signals and translates them into a constant output
stream of signals to control our muscles. We have this complex reaction
machine because it helps us survive. It helps us produce behavior that
maximizes our odds of survival.

Everything we talk about such as consciousness and awareness and first
person experience is nothing more and nothing less than the operation of
this reaction machine.

When we talk about "seeing" a red apple, all that is happening is the
stimulus signals that represent the red apple is being processed in this
network and at some level, signals that represent "red apple" are created
in the network. The low level light signals coming from the eye, get
transformed into higher and higher abstractions until it reaches the point
of "red apple". Once we get to that point in the processing, we have
"seen" a red apple. We are conscious of seeing a red apple. There's
nothing more that needs to be explained to explain what happens to make us
conscious of seeing a red apple.

The rest of the brain will however respond to the fact that we have seen a
red apple, and in combination with everything else that the network is
currently aware of, the brain will produce behaviors that are appropriate
for the currently active stimulus conditions. Though some signals
represent the red apple, other signals at the same time will represent the
other things we are seeing and the other state of the environment based on
recent past stimulus signals. All those stimulus signals combined, are
what leads to whatever behavior we end up producing in response to these
conditions.

In order for such a machine to pass a Turing Test, it must be very similar
in function to the human brain. It must have the same level of ability to
analyze stimulus signals and decode them to the same sorts of object
classes, and it must have the same sort of ability to produce the wide
range of behaviors that we can produce in response to these stimulus
signals. If it has all that, then it has everything we have. And if it
has everything we have, it will have the same type of conscious awareness
we have.

Many people like to talk of consciousness as if it were a ghost in the
machine - a left over from the theories that said we had a soul and that
the soul was the source of our behavior. It's fine to think this, if not
for the fact that we have so much evidence that there is no soul and there
is no ghost in the machine. There's just the machine. So all the stuff we
have been talking about under the heading of consciousness, is just us,
talking about the things one of these machines does.

People also liked to believe that man made machines didn't have one of
these souls. And now, they have changed that believe into a belief that
the machine doesn't have consciousness. But that's no longer logical. It
makes no sense. It doesn't follow from the fact that humans are just
biological machines. If we are just machines (which everything we know
about science confirms that this is what we are), then what type of machine
are we? And everything we currently know about the brain and about
building machines that do the things humans do, tells us that we are
nothing more than a reaction machine as I described above. This leaves no
room to fit in the idea that we have a special property called
consciousness which computers don't have, because if we are a reaction
machine, and the computers are already reaction machine, they must
logically have the same sorts of experience we have - just not at the same
level of awareness. Which only means that we recognize more unique sensory
conditions than a typical computer can, and we can produce more reactions
to these conditions than computers can.

The only people I run into who don't seem to understand, or follow this
type of logic, are the ones that don't seem to have actually tried to
figure out for themselves, what type of machine a human must be.

The problem here, is if you don't accept that humans are just physical
machines, or you don't try to understand what type of machine we are, you
will have no tools for understanding any of this. You will be stuck where
the philosophers are stuck - guessing at something they have no tools to
explain. Meaning, they can go as far as "I think, therefore I am", and
then they hit a brick wall. They can't explain what "thinking" is, or what
"existence" is, or what "knowledge" is, or what "awareness" is. All they
can do is accept it as given that these things happen. This also means
they have no way of knowing if other machines have the same things (such as
humans - the primary other minds problem) and machines.

But since I'm not limited to thinking about thought - I can think about
physics and how it creates thought - I can reduce thought to a lower level
- the physical level. And from that level, I can understand what humans
have in common with machines. And it's from this level, that leads me to
an understanding of what the mind is, and what consciousness is, and to the
understanding that you can't build a machine that can pass the Turing Test
without, at the same time, giving it a mind, and consciousness. This is
because the features of the machine that give us one, are the same features
that give us the other.

All I have to say about this,
Stephen

You certainly said a lot!

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
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