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Article 7394 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: We've Been Tricked- consciousness
Message-ID: <1992Oct26.050021.22535@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: 26 Oct 92 05:00:21 GMT
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In article <BwpHGD.EMy@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (lincoln carr) writes:

 
>It would seem that consciousness, just like any other human
>discretization of the world, can be formed in a two-valued way.  What
>does it really mean to be a member of any group?  If the group is more
>than a bunch of things clumped together in name only and the things
>actually share some minimum criteria, then the classification is two
>valued.  Either a thing meets the minima or it doesn't.  The real
>issue is primarily establishing the minima for admittance and then
>devising tests to see whether things meet these minima.  So, I don't
>really see what your objection to "consciousness being a two-valued
>category" is.

Later you say,

>On rethinking your claims a bit more, I can see how you could define
>"consciousness" in such a way that it would come in degrees, like,
>say, intelligence.  However, it seems that the burden falls upon you
>to support such a claim just as I have been trying to support my
>two-valued consciousness = apperception claim.  Why is this untenable?

So far as I can see, your entire enterprise is untenable.  You cannot
define things; you can only define words.  Your position would seem to
be that !consciousness! is not a real phenomenon, but something you
can define.

In my view, when people speak about consciousness, each of them is
referring to a different combination of quite a few kinds of
psychological phenomena, e.g., various forms of short-term memories of
various recent mental activities.  I'm inclined to suppose that all of
these are matters of degree.   Are you trying to propose some set of
thresholds for all of these and trying to get everyone else to use
those thresholds?  Unless you define those vectors and your reasons
for setting thresholds, this would seem quixotic.

.


