From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!michael Tue Jan 28 12:18:18 EST 1992
Article 3186 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!michael
>From: michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and Panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Jan28.004208.27238@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
References: <1992Jan27.155128.5910@oracorp.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1992 00:42:08 GMT

In article <1992Jan27.155128.5910@oracorp.com> daryl@oracorp.com writes:
>(In response to Michael Gemar's accusing Strong AI of panpsychism):
> 
>Michael, I want to be the first pro-AI poster to comp.ai.philosophy to
>accept your charges of panpsychism. I think that you are right, that it
>is a consequence of Strong AI, even if most pro-AI people don't like to
>admit it.

Great!  I'm glad to get a clear answer.        

[a long bit deleted.  The basic assertion made is that properties can
be broken into descriptive, which are assigned by humans but have
no causal relevance, and causal, which exist in nature and are
causally important.  Consciousness is asserted to be the former type
of property.  I hope this summary captures the essence of the argument.
See the original posting if you want more info...] 

>How does this relate to the original question of panpsychism? Well, it
>may be true that panpsychism, the belief that tornadoes and nations'
>economies and thermostats are all conscious, but so what? There is no
>more consequences to such a statement than there is to a statement
>like "Andy Warhol's paintings are all much more beautiful than Van
>Gogh's, only people haven't realized it yet". Descriptive properties
>have no causal force other than indirectly, through people's *belief*
>that they hold. So there is no causal force to the statement "this
>being (machine or person) is conscious", and neither is there any
>causal force to the statement "this machine is not conscious". There
>is causal force to a statement like "David Gudeman believes that this
>being is conscious". (I'm singling out David Gudeman because he has
>pointed out that our morality might demand that we treat conscious
>beings in a certain way.)

I suppose then that this makes you, to use the standard philosophical
labels, either an epiphenomenalist or an eliminativist with regard to 
the mental.  That is, you *don't* believe that the *cause* of you moving
your fingers to type is your conscious thought "Gee, I'd like to type."
I won't debate this point right now, because it would get us sidetracked.

However, I think that you point out one *very* good reason above to 
believe that consciousness is *not* merely descriptive, and that the
moral consequences if it is.  If there is no fact of the matter whether
something is conscious, then morality (or at least most versions of it)
goes out the window.  Why should I treat *you* as conscious, if that is
merely a "descriptive" term?  And therefore, why should I treat you as any
more worthy of ethical consideration than a rock, or a roomfull of air, or
a computer?

>My response to a claim that a thermostat, or a tornado is conscious is
>"Tell me something interesting". If I don't know how to have a nice
>conversation with a tornado, I don't care whether it is conscious or
>not; I'm not going to treat it as conscious.

Well, I don't know how to have a nice conversation with
a Chinese person, but I think that they are conscious.  I don't know how
to converse with Martians, but if there were any (in the classical sense
of course) I would think that they are conscious.  Heck, I don't know how
to talk with dolphins, but *they* might be conscious.  

> And if someone tells me
>how I can have a nice conversation with a tornado, I still won't care
>whether it is *really* conscious, I will go ahead and try to strike up
>a conversation.

I guess the difference between us is that you seem to believe that ascriptions
of consciousness are merely amatter of taste, not right or wrong, whereas I
believe that there is a *fact of the matter* whether or not something is
conscious - heck, I know that *I* am conscious, and that *that* is a *fact*,
and not merely an ascription.

- michael



