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Article 3372 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and Panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Feb1.225819.11340@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Keywords: panpsychism
Organization: Indiana University
References: <21879@life.ai.mit.edu> <1992Jan31.163659.11670@javelin.sim.es.com> <1992Jan31.231006.7248@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 1 Feb 92 22:58:19 GMT
Lines: 25

In article <1992Jan31.231006.7248@news.media.mit.edu> minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:

>Ah, that's my point.  Perhaps *you* can conceive of a "mind" capable
>of any of the activities we are usually so proud of --- without being
>"conscious"  -- but I can't or, at least, I've trained myself not to.
>This is because I'm developing that hypothesis mentioned above, that
>the phenomena we call consciousness are caused by parts of the mind
>accessing partial records (that is, condensed traces) of the recent states
>of other parts.  Now, *I* can't conceive of a mechanism being able to
>do the sorts of things you mentioned -- logical analysis, poetry,
>whimsy, -- all without (where you said "being "conscious") being able
>to use recent records of its activity.

I can't either; but I can imagine a system doing all that accessing
of records, etc, without being conscious (I think that in practice,
any such system would be conscious, but the notion of such an
unconscious system isn't incoherent, any more than is the concept
of a replica of me that lacks conscious states).  Which seems to me
to indicate that your analysis of "consciousness" as access can't
be the whole story.

-- 
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."


