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Article 3390 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Strong AI and Panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Feb2.050613.28988@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 2 Feb 92 05:06:13 GMT
References: <1992Jan30.204029.27574@psych.toronto.edu> <1992Feb1.215002.7208@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Feb1.235203.28395@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
Lines: 64

In article <1992Feb1.235203.28395@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:

>But *surely* the reason that Strong-AI types are up in arms about the
>Chinese Room is that they don't *just* want to explain *behaviour*, but
>also *phenomenal states*.

Well, whatever AI might want to do in principle, no AI work that I've
ever seen has even begun to explain phenomenal states.  Mostly, insofar
as AI is a branch of cognitive science at all, it's interested in
modeling human function.  Of course, most people in AI have a stake
in the claim that when human function is reproduced, those systems
will have human-like phenomenal states, and I agree with that claim.
But modeling phenomenal states isn't the direct goal of any work
that I've seen.

>Surely Dennett, in his latest
>book "Consciousness Explained" sees his role, *as a cognitive scientist*,
>to explain the subjective nature of experience.  Even eliminativists offer
>some account as to why we are wrong to *believe* that there are such
>things as phenomenal states (at least as popularly conceived).  

Well, Dennett doesn't really believe in phenomenal states at all; the
cognitive-science part of his book is a purely psychological account
of human functional capacities.  When it comes to talking about
qualia, he turns into a philosopher, and essentially denies their
existence.  Similarly for the eliminativists you mention.  I'm not
saying that work in cognitive science can't cast light on the qualia
problem indirectly, but I am saying that work in cognitive science is
almost never aimed at explaining qualia (except for those people who
identify qualia with some psychological capacity, e.g. discriminative
capacities, which is a mistaken identification in my view; those people
might think they're explaining qualia, but they're not really coming
to grips with the problem).

>More deeply, I think the reason that we *care* about
>the psychological states from an ethical point of view is *because* of
>their phenomenal components.
>Indeed, it seems to me that if one had an entity which
>exhibited such "psychological" states (states characterized by their
>role in the causation/explanation of action), but did *not* possess
>*phenomenal* states as well, then such an entity would *not* be an
>object of moral concern.

>In addition, even if the above were *not* true, it is *still* the case
>that the vast majority of utilitarian systems are built on the importance
>of *phenomenal* states.  I don't care if you *act* like I caused you pain -
>I want to know if I *did* cause you pain, if you *experienced* pain.  This

Well, I have different intuitions about this; in any case, I'm no
ethicist and don't have deeply-held views on the matter.  But I
think one can see that there is something wrong with the straight
experience-based account of ethics by considering Nozick's (_Anarchy,
State, and Utopia_, p. 42) "experience machine", the machine that drugs
us and hooks our brain up in the right way, providing incredibly
pleasurable experiences for the rest of our lives; it seems to me that
this wouldn't be the most desirable way of life.  Personally I think
that psychological states are more central to our identities as persons
than phenomenal states, although I recognize that this could be argued to
death back-and-forth.

-- 
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."


