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Article 3204 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Intelligence Testing
Message-ID: <11976@optima.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 28 Jan 92 07:13:34 GMT
Sender: news@cs.arizona.edu
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In article  <42304@dime.cs.umass.edu> Joseph O'Rourke writes:
]But it seems to me the issue is, how much must they be like you
]for you to ascribe consciousness to them?  It seems the following
]set of beliefs are coherent (I am not claiming I believe them all):

Finally!  Someone actually bothers to give an argument for this
position that is not rifled with weak analogies and hidden
assumptions.  Thank you Joseph.

]1. Understanding (grasping meanings of) is impossible without
]   consciousness.
]
]2. It is possible that consciousness does not require biological tissue.
]
]3. As a result of a deep Turing Test -like conversation with a machine,
]   you have to admit that it seems the machine grasps meanings.

I'm willing to accept all of those premises.

]4. Since you believe (1), you are led to wonder if perhaps the machine
]   is conscious.

Yes, it is a possibility to consider, but it is far from established
(5 and 6 don't add anything to the argument, so I'll omit them).  But
now add the propositions

7. The machine answers questions by purely syntactic manipulations.

8. Consciousness doesn't seem to have any relationship to syntactic
manipulations.

And your possibility 4, which was never more than a 50-50 proposition
anyway, becomes seriously doubtful.
--
					David Gudeman
gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
noao!arizona!gudeman


