Re: Does Searle's "Chinese Room" argument imply that consciousness is non-scientific?

On Sep 26, 2:51 am, c...@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) wrote:

...


Some of us, think humans are really special
(maybe - if we are lucky - beyond the ability
of science to understand), and some of us,
think humans aren't all that special at all
(that the cold and unemotional tools of
science will soon reveal that humans, at the
core, are cold unemotional deterministic
machines).


If "having an emotion" means a mechanism that
carries out certain categories of responses in
certain kinds of situations then mechanisms
can have emotions.

When you talk about an "UNemotional machine"
I believe you are really talking about it not
having subjective experiences we call "emotions"
which can be correlated with activations of
certain brain states.

These motivational states we call emotions
change the operational states of other systems.
When you are sad or happy you walk differently.
When you are afraid or feeling safe you react
differently to the same stimuli.

A working machine would need emotional states
to cause it to engage behaviors which result
in some desirable outcome such as feeding
itself or avoiding falling off a ledge or the
ability to function in a social environment
such as making friends, caring for others,
competing for resources or fighting enemies.

Emotions are innate states that allow humans and
animals to modify their responses in a way that
enhances their survival and thus their reproductive
success. It is a primitive kind of reasoning
that says: don't go near the snake, don't trust
that stranger, keep away from the cliff, without
which you would have to learn by trial and error
that a snake bite kills, falling off a cliff is
not good and a stranger can mean danger which
would make you uncompetitive with those who had
a built in response system to those things.

You could say that the subjective experience of
having an emotion is the machine having access to
the sensory data of an emotional state. It knows
when it is happy or sad and can talk about it.

In other words an emotional state not only changes
physical behaviors (we can observe our angry actions)
but also allows us to recognize, to know, what the
particular state is. Certain internal signals become
associated with the label "angry".


--
JC


.

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