Re: We Robot

On 6 Oct, 15:13, Ymir <inva...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article
<1357c039-9e86-49c2-8186-bbeb8eb36...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

 someone2 <glenn.spig...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well physicalists don't know why some physical activity would
consciously experience and not others, nevertheless it doesn't prevent
them from speculating that a mobile phone isn't consciously
experiencing, nor having an expected behaviour for it while holding
that speculation.

Their speculation, however, is actually based on evidence -- they
observe that mobile phones don't share any of the behaviours which are
taken as evidence for consciousness.

The speculations which you have provided don't have any evidentiary
support.

I am looking at the laws of physics as simply mathematical
descriptions about how the physical has been observed to behave. That
in physicalism there isn't the physical plus the laws that govern it,
that all there is is the physical.

Umm. I've never heard of any physicalist who argues that physicalism
includes the physical but excludes physical laws.

These descriptions have turned out
to be quite neat formulas. Which with our current observations of how
the physical behaves allow us to give pretty accurate expected
behaviors for physical interactions of mechanisms such as mobile
phones, and I was assuming for the robot. Though if you insist that
the robot could not have its behaviour described in terms of the known
laws of physics, then we can simply say following the laws of physics
then. As long as we are investigating the assumption that the same
laws apply regardless of whether something is consciously experiencing
or not.

Yes, I'll accept that assumption

In other words that something that is consciously experiencing
can have it's behaviour described in the same terms of physics as
something which isn't conscously experiencing.

Yes, but they won't have the *same* behaviour, which is something which
you keep glossing over. From a physicalist standpoint, one class of
physical configurations would, as a consequence of the laws of physics,
give rise to conscious experience, which would in turn give rise to
certain behaviours. A different set of physical configurations would, as
a consequence of the same laws, fail to give rise to consciousness, and
would therefore exhibit entirely different sets of behaviours.

A mobile phone and a can-opener both follow the exact same laws of
physics, and yet we do not expect them to exhibit similar behaviours as
a result. Why do you insist that we should expect the same sets of
behaviours from conscious and non-conscious entities if they are simply
following the laws of physics?

Do you agree that regardless of what speculation there was that the
robot was consciously experiencing, as long as it follows the laws of
physics it will always be behaving as expected given the speculation
that conscious experiences are related to organic chemistry, and that
as the robot isn't composed of organic chemicals, that it isn't
consciously experiencing?

A physicalist making such a speculation would have to provide some
evidence that organic chemistry is somehow a necessary component of the
class of configurations which give rise to consciousness and show how
this follows from the laws of physics. Your hypothetical theorist isn't
doing this. They're essentially asserting that organic chemistry is
somehow magical and that therefore it can be conscious. That's
mysticism, not physicalism.

What we are capable of speculating has no relationship to how the
universe actually works. I can speculate that planetary orbits are not
the result of gravity, but of magical pixies which like pushing things
around in ellipsis in a way which exactly mimics what gravitational
theory predicts. The fact that I can speculate this, though, in know way
makes it correct or worth pursuing as a genuine alternative to testable
theories based on actual empirical evidence.


You avoided answering the question:
-------------
Do you agree that regardless of what speculation there was that the
robot was consciously experiencing, as long as it follows the laws of
physics it will always be behaving as expected given the speculation
that conscious experiences are related to organic chemistry, and that
as the robot isn't composed of organic chemicals, that it isn't
consciously experiencing?
-------------

The reason that your answer is important, is that if you do agree that
it is behaving as they would expect given their speculation, then
there can never be any scientific evidence for any of the speculations
where it is assumed that something that consciously experiences can
have its behaviour described in terms of the same laws of physics as
something that doesn't. To consider that there was ever evidence for
any speculation that held the prior assumption is a display of
ignorance of the issue.

If you don't understand the above, then just answer the question, and
I'll walk you through it.



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