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Article 2615 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Intelligence testing
Message-ID: <1992Jan10.012629.27362@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 10 Jan 92 01:26:29 GMT
References: <1992Jan3.122235.26340@aifh.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan4.001854.2209@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <5921@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Indiana University
Lines: 37

In article <5921@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>In article <1992Jan4.001854.2209@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:

>>Answer to Q1: on this view, it's quite possible that consciousness is
>>irrelevant to explaining behaviour (this is something like my own
>>view). 
>
>I find this entirely bizarre.  People are conscious, yet that's
>irrelevant to explaining their behavior, even though it seems to them
>that consciousness is involved in the production of their behavior.
>It's hard to see why you wouldn't then conclude they just as well
>might not be conscious.  Indeed, the Behaviorists are often accused of
>just that sort of conclusion.

I know about consciousness from my own case, of course -- otherwise
there would be no reason to postulate it (at least not in the
strongest sense of phenomenal consciousness).

The conclusion that consciousness is irrelevant in explaining
behaviour seems forced upon one from the fact that (1) there's
in principle a complete explanation of behaviour in terms of the
physical facts; and (2) it's conceptually coherent that one
could have all those physical facts without consciousness -- i.e.
consciousness is not conceptually entailed by the physical facts,
though it's empirically implied by them (note that this is enough
to make consciousness unlike just about everything else in the
world).  So consciousness is something extra over and above the
physical facts, and doesn't do any causal work of its own.

That's just a prima facie plausible argument, of course, and it
does lead to some strange conclusions, but I can't currently see
any way around it.

-- 
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."


