Re: We Robot
- From: DuhIdiot <jmSasPhbAurMn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:37:12 +0000
Eric Rowley, on 29 Sep 2008, in talk.origins, decided this was a worthy use
of a keyboard:
From: someone2 <glenn.spigel2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
<snip>
You falsely state that there is an assumption that consciouly
experiencing has no effect on behavior. When this is only an
implication of the assumption that is made in the paper which is;
the assumption that something that does consciously experience
could have its behaviour described in terms of the same laws of
physics that would describe the behaviour of something that
doesn't.
Why does describing something in terms of the laws of physics
imply that consciousness has no effect on it?
If you are rejecting that assumption then fine,
the paper itself is just pointing out that it is implausible.
Eric
If I may, let me attempt a précis of Glenn's argument:
A physicalist (call him Phil) looks at a robot which passes the Turing test
(call it Robbie). Phil knows every detail of how the robot works, down to
the states and rules of every node in Robbie's neural network "brain". Per
Glenn, this allows Phil to predict Robbie's behavior with total accuracy,
but for some weird reason it doesn't allow Phil to know if Robbie really is
conscious.
Phil must predict the same behavior whether he considers Robbie conscious
or not conscious; after all, it's still the same robot governed by the same
physics. This means that Phil considers consciousness to be irrelevant to
Robbie's behavior. This is the crux of Glenn's spiel.
Being a physicalist, if Phil knew a human's mechanism in perfect detail,
he'd also have to predict the same behavior for the human regardless of
consciousness. So Phil also considers consciousness to be irrelevant to
people's behavior. Phil's physicalism has clearly led him to an absurd
conclusion and is therefore piffle.
I pointed out in my "DI1-DI4" post what I see as the main problem here.
Others have argued that fully knowing Robbie's build doesn't necessarily
let you predict its behavior. Other others have noted that proclaiming that
Phil's total knowledge of Robbie's build allows him to predict behavior but
not consciousness assumes Glenn's conclusion that physicalism is false.
These and other objections I consider interesting side issues.
--
J. B. Mashburn, the sad left tail of the bell curve
alt.atheist #2295, http://questioner.www2.50megs.com/list1.html
EAC Chief Of Maintenance for God's cloaking device - 14 billion years and
not one glitch!
"What a day, if you can look it in the face and hold your vomit." - Faith
No More
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