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Article 7399 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (lincoln carr)
Subject: Re: We've Been Tricked- consciousness
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Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1992 21:01:25 GMT
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In article <1992Oct26.050021.22535@news.media.mit.edu> minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:

>
>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.
>


I agree that I can't really define things as they exist in reality,
unless you want to digress into a long discussion about how conceptual
entities such as numbers "exist."  In fact, being the good
Kantian-inflenced person that I am, I won't claim to have any
knowledge of noumena, or things-in-themselves, or at least very
little.  My only enterprise,
which is perhaps quite quixotic, has been to strike upon a common,
testable definition of a term.  This is done continually in science
and philosophy.  To wave one's hands and say that many people use many
different definitions currently seems irrelevent.  We could devise
some other term for the phenomena that are associated with
consciousness, but why is this necessary?  My only claim has been that
my definition of consciousness as apperception is consistent, somewhat
testable, and therefore usable pragmatically.  I openly invite
challenges to my definition in the form of arguments against me or in
the form of alternate definitions, but I can't see your claim that the
enterprise is in itself untenable, unless you're making some kind of
claim that words are completely inadequate.




-- 
Lincoln R. Carr, Computer Scientist-Philosopher    lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu
"Treat all rational autonomous moral agents, whether in the form of yourself
or another, never as means solely, but always as ends in themselves."
                  Immanuel Kant, from "Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals"


