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Article 3369 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and Panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Feb1.222126.9280@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Keywords: panpsychism
Organization: Indiana University
References: <1992Jan28.153645.5237@cs.yale.edu> <1992Jan28.164410.9509@psych.toronto.edu> <21879@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 1 Feb 92 22:21:26 GMT
Lines: 37

In article <21879@life.ai.mit.edu> minsky@transit.ai.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:

>As for "consciousness" the situation is worse.  There are lots of
>mental phenomena sometimes called by that name, but so far as I can
>see, what they mostly share in common is
>_short_term_memories_about_recent_mental states.

I don't know about this.  My paradigm of a conscious state is a
sensation of bright green.  It seems to me that you can have one of
those without it necessarily producing memories (though it had better
produce some memories if you're going to talk about it).

What you're saying seems more appropriate if one is talking about
so-called "self-consciousness". or perhaps reflective consciousness,
when one introspects the contents of one's mental states.  This is
only one aspect of consciousness, however, and arguably not the
real mystery.

>I don't believe that
>we are in any deep sense "self-aware"; we have virtually no sense of
>where our words come from, or how we walk, or how we see, etc.  We do
>remember that we recently smiled, etc., and this is very useful.  It
>keeps you, for example, from getting into wastefully repetitive loops.
>But "reflective" short term memories -- records of recent mental
>states that can be used as uinputs to other processes -- have many
>other uses, and (surely) many different mechanisms with different
>evolutionary histories and functions.

I agree with all this, but I don't see how it eliminates the mystery of
why certain kinds of processing have a qualitative feel.  This helps
explain our abilities and capacities, but that sensation of bright green
isn't an ability or a capacity, though it may be associated with them.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."


