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Article 7391 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (lincoln carr)
Subject: Re: We've Been Tricked- consciousness
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Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1992 01:53:23 GMT
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In article <BwL6LM.CL1@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> pindor@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor) writes:

>I wonder
>what evidence the people who talk about consciousenss being a two-valued 
>category (yes or no) have for a consciousness of very young infants?
>Except for a blind belief, an idea of integer number of conscioussneses (?)
>in the Universe seems untenable.
>

It would seem that consciousness, just like any other human
discretization of the world, can be formed in a two-valued way.  What
does it really mean to be a member of any group?  If the group is more
than a bunch of things clumped together in name only and the things actually
share some minimum criteria, then the classification is two valued.
Either a thing meets the minima or it doesn't.  The real issue is
primarily establishing the minima for admittance and then devising
tests to see whether things meet these minima.  So, I don't really see
what your objection to "consciousness being a two-valued category" is.
Also, the thing about infants would seem to fall under testability.  I
was merely using infants as a seemingly putative example of beings
that most would call conscious, but, if it helps the argument, I can
switch to dolphins.

-- 
Lincoln R. Carr, Computer Scientist-Philosopher    lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu
"Treat all rational autonomous moral agents, whether in the form of yourself
or another, never as means solely, but always as ends in themselves."
                  Immanuel Kant, from "Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals"


