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Article 3367 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and Panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Feb1.215002.7208@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
References: <1992Jan29.210141.26133@cs.yale.edu> <1992Jan29.214150.1709@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Jan30.204029.27574@psych.toronto.edu>
Date: Sat, 1 Feb 92 21:50:02 GMT
Lines: 50

In article <1992Jan30.204029.27574@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:

>>Cognitive science is all about explaining human action, and it
>>seems to me that that can be done without invoking phenomenal
>>consciousness.
>
>This seems to be a type of behaviourist version of cognitive science.
>I don't mean to invoke "behaviourism" as a dirty word, but my
>view of cognitive science has always been that it was the study of the
>*mind*, and not of behaviour.  I would include phenomenal consciousness
>as an aspect of the mind.  If this isn't the case, why do AI types *care*
>whether the computer "actually" understands, as long as it *acts* like
>it does.  Surely understanding is in part phenomenal.   

Not behaviourist at all.  I think it's fairly uncontroversial that
the main goal of psychology (or cognitive science) is to explain behaviour.
One has to distinguish between the goal of the explanatory process
and the entities appealed to in explanation.  Modern cognitive scientists
are distinguished from behaviourists by their willingness to appeal to
internal entities in making their explanations; however, behaviour
remains the ultimate goal of the explanation.

Whether or not cognitive science *ought* to be concerned with the
explanation of phenomenal states, as well as that of behaviour, when
I look around I don't see many cognitive scientists doing this.

>Here I would violently disagree, at least if I understand you.  All of
>utilitarianism is based on the importance of phenomenal experience.  
>All of ethics proper is based on the notion of free will and choice
>(else there would be no ethical *decisions*, and so no ethics).  If
>materialism *is* true, and all of behaviour is completely predictable
>from material interaction, then no such decision process can exist.
>This is, of course, old stuff.

Well, there's a lot I could say here.  For a start, despite my views on
consciousness, I still think that behaviour is determined by physical
processes, and I don't see why that's incompatible with free will in
any sense in which it's clear that we possess it (e.g. the ability to
do what we want, other things being equal).  More deeply, I think
that the mental properties that are relevant to ethics are much more
likely to be *psychological* properties, such as beliefs, desires,
hopes, fears, etc, rather than phenomenal properties.  And our
psychological states (i.e. states characterized by their role in the
causation/explanation of action) seem to be entirely explainable within
a materialist/functionalist framework, in principle.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."


