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From: stevens@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu (Greg Stevens)
Subject: Re: Thought Question
Message-ID: <1995Jan19.012319.11492@galileo.cc.rochester.edu>
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Date: Thu, 19 Jan 95 01:23:19 GMT
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In <3f65nb$m71@hpsystem1.informatik.tu-muenchen.de> stoehrs@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Susanne Stoehr) writes:
>In article <1995Jan12.184559.2530@galileo.cc.rochester.edu>, stevens@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu (Greg Stevens) writes:

>|> While it is an interesting thought experiment, and brings up the point that
>|> there is no evolutionary benefit to consciousness (as natural selection acts
>|> on behaviors not thoughts), it is assuming that organisms and responsiveness
>|> CAN arise without subjective perception.  People say, "Well, I can imagine
>|> an organism with no subjectivity but still behaving as I do..." but is
>|> it possible? 

>I havn't finished Minsky's "The mind of society" yet, but he had already a few
>interesting ideas. You use different behaviors depending on the actual
>conditions of your environment, which are indeed important for surviving. 
>But in order to follow a great goal you must have an "image" of yourself,
>like "I'm a person who wants to become a big boss soon" and so on. I 
>think that for this you must be conscious of yourself and have subjectivity. 

But the question is, is it possible to create something with such consistency,
by brute force programming or whatever, which does not have consciousness.
Sure, you can assert that consciousness is what gives rise to consistency
in US.  However, it seems that in theory it is computationally possible
to create something which processes data differently from us but gives
the same output with respect to input.  Do all such ways of producing
our output given our input have consciousness.

Greg Stevens

stevens@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu

