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Article 7396 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: baker4@scws6.harvard.edu (David Baker)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: We've Been Tricked- consciousness
Message-ID: <BAKER4.92Oct26065242@scws6.harvard.edu>
Date: 26 Oct 92 14:52:42 GMT
Article-I.D.: scws6.BAKER4.92Oct26065242
References: <nijmanm.719758335@hpas7> <BwJuuE.DpD@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu><BwL6LM.CL1@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> <BwpH90.EBv@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Department of Psychology, Harvard University
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In-reply-to: lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu's message of 26 Oct 92 01:53:23 GMT

In article <BwpH90.EBv@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (lincoln carr) writes:

   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.

There is a problem with your argument: certain classes of sets are not so
cleanly divided, and "conscious beings" may be one of them.  Take, as an
analogy, the concept of a "pile," say of stones.  What is the minimum
criterion for a collection of stones' being a pile?  Is a group of ten stones
a pile?  Nine? Two? Twenty?  Not only will there be vast disagreement if
several people are asked to draw the line, but it can be said that there
really is no line that can be drawn.  Perhaps there are distinct concepts
"pile" and "non-pile", and given a group of fifty stones (or an adult human),
one might be able to say with certainty that that entity is a pile (or
conscious) (or, conversely, one stone is definitely not a pile, and a chair
is definitely not conscious), but I don't think it can be said that there is
any kind of well-defined line between them.  Consciousness must exist on a
continuum.

Now, given that consciousness is not usually thought of as on a continuum,
what does this mean for our concept of consciousness?

--
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David P. Baker			      | 
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