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Article 3610 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Strong AI and panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Feb10.041129.2879@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 10 Feb 92 04:11:29 GMT
References: <1992Feb7.154307.2106@oracorp.com>
Organization: Indiana University
Lines: 21

In article <1992Feb7.154307.2106@oracorp.com> daryl@oracorp.com writes:

>Being "highly gerrymandered" seems to me to be a matter of the
>difficulty of interpreting a rock as conscious, but it doesn't seem to
>be relevant to the question of whether it can be so interpreted. Why
>should a convoluted, complex definition of the mental states count any
>less than a straight-forward one?

You must have misunderstood something: it's Putnam's physical "states"
that are gerrymandered.  The notion of gerrymandered mental states
doesn't come into the picture.  I'm a realist about (phenomenal)
mental states in any case, so definition and interpretation is
irrelevant to their existence.  The notion of implementation via
physical states and processes comes up as part of a *theory* about
the physical bases of consciousness, rather than being any kind of
definition or conceptual analysis of consciousness.

-- 
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."


