From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdat!swf Fri Oct 30 15:18:03 EST 1992
Article 7430 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdat!swf
>From: swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: We've Been Tricked- consciousness
Message-ID: <1332@tdat.teradata.COM>
Date: 29 Oct 92 01:01:02 GMT
References: <BwpHGD.EMy@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> <BwqppI.IsM@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> <Bwsqpo.8EE@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Oct28.163845.122707@Cookie.secapl.com>
Sender: news@tdat.teradata.COM
Reply-To: swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit
Lines: 31

In article <1992Oct28.163845.122707@Cookie.secapl.com> frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes:
|In article <Bwsqpo.8EE@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (lincoln carr) writes:
|>The same kind of difficulty arises when one asks the same kinds of
|>questions about rationality.  If I want to support, say, minimum
|>requirements for consciousness, it is well within the scope of my
|>imagination to conceive that, in the course of evolution, that there
|>were beings just below these minima and that their progeny developed
|>just above these minima. ...

|Every real world property I can think of behaves this way.  "Alive",
|"taller than 6 feet", whatever.  The vast majority of cases may be
|clearly defined, but if you look hard you can find borderline cases.  It
|is really a radical suggestion that consciousness might be different,
|and I see no reason to think it is true.

This is essentially the point I was trying to make to begin with!
You put it quite well.

I would say this is *particularly* true of properties relevent to living
things.  In my long study of biology I do not think I can say I have *ever*
found even *one* property that is always clearcut, and that is a strong
statement.  Even such apparently binary items as 'mutually interfertile'
have ambiguous and intermediate cases (of several different kinds even!).

Biology just doesn't work like physics, or like boolean algebra.  Answers
are rarely an unqualified yes or no.  Biological classes are fuzzy, not
binary (like the set of all electrons).
-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com


