Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!utnut!utgpu!pindor
From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and consciousness
Message-ID: <D03I45.FoB@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <19941129.084940.318@almaden.ibm.com>
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 19:28:52 GMT
Lines: 62

In article <19941129.084940.318@almaden.ibm.com>,
 <mpriestley@VNET.IBM.COM> wrote:
>Andrzej Pindor writes:
>>you can hold such a view. When people had no way of distinguishing between
>>gold and fool's gold, what sense does it make to say that they only mistakenly
>>thought that fool's gold was gold?? They used the word 'gold' for a substance
>>with given properties. How do you know that in fact they did not mean mica
>
>I agree with you: the word "gold" at the time arguably included both substances
>(fool's gold and real gold, as we now distinguish them).
>
>However, the pertinence of the discussion to AI and consciousness lies in
>a different direction.  The original point, I believe, was meant as a
>rebuttal of the "if I can't see a difference, there is no difference".

Not really. This particular discussion was about whether ancient gold-lovers
were "wrong" if they called "gold" something which is not gold by to-day's
standards (element Au), even though they were unable to distinguish this
something from element Au. 

>Now, if you had given a lump of fool's gold to a medieval monk, he might have
>been quite correct, by his standards, to say "that's gold".
>
Exactly.

>If you give the same monk a lump of real gold, and a lump of fool's gold,
>and ask "is there a difference?" and he answers "no, there is no difference"
>is he right?
>
In absolute terms your question "is there a difference?" is meaningless.
To talk about difference you need to know what are criteria of this 
difference.  By his criteria there is no difference. By today's criteria,
there is. 

>Right now, the two "consciousnesses" are human and AI.  Is there a difference?

What is this "AI consciousnesses"? 

...........
>First: I really can't buy the "if I can't see a difference there is no
>difference" line.  Call me an unfrozen Newtonian cave-man: I think the

If you insist :-).

>difference exists independent of our ability to see it, and if we find a
>difference later in time, we say "oops!" not "oh, reality changed again".
>
This is not what the discussion was about. And again to talk about "difference"
you have to specify criteria. Criteria may change and then we wil say "there
is a difference" when previously we would say "there is no difference".

>Second: in any case, there is already a difference between computer
>consciousness and human consciousness.  The question is whether we think
>the difference is larger than we currently can tell, or smaller.  This is
>pretty much an article of faith, for either side.

Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
