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Article 3012 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: The Turing Test Argument
Message-ID: <1992Jan22.194940.19041@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
References: <1992Jan20.211931.15982@oracorp.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 92 19:49:40 GMT
Lines: 32

In article <1992Jan20.211931.15982@oracorp.com> daryl@oracorp.com writes:
>David Gudeman writes:

>> (1a) Consciousness of an entity is a cause of communication in that entity.
>
>I reject assumption (1a), and, as a matter of fact, I don't know
>anyone who accepts it.

????  (1a) is surely a majority position, being accepted by people with
views as diverse as Searle and Dennett.  (I'm not sure that *I* accept
it, but that's irrelevant.)

<The usual assumption made by Strong AI is that
>consciousness is *not* an additional ingredient in a system, but is a
>consequence of the system implementing a certain program. In that
>case, both communication ability and consciousness are caused by the
>system's design, and consciousness, of itself, doesn't cause anything.

Just because consciousness follows from the system's design doesn't
mean that consciousness doesn't cause.  Guns cause, metabolism causes,
political decisions cause, and all these things are high-level
organizational properties.  Unless you want to take the hard-line
position that only atoms can cause.  Of course any given instance
of e.g. gun-causation will also be an instance of atom-causation,
but that doesn't matter; we're just looking at the system at two
different levels of description.  So it is with consciousness,
according to what I take it is the received view.

-- 
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."


