From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!uunet!stanford.edu!rutgers!uwvax!meteor!tobis Wed Sep 23 16:54:53 EDT 1992
Article 7017 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!uunet!stanford.edu!rutgers!uwvax!meteor!tobis
>From: tobis@meteor.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Brain and Mind
Message-ID: <1992Sep23.191351.5396@meteor.wisc.edu>
Date: 23 Sep 92 19:13:51 GMT
References: <1992Sep13.194856.21976@meteor.wisc.edu> <1992Sep22.043249.4954@meteor.wisc.edu> <7209@pkmab.se>
Organization: University of Wisconsin, Meteorology and Space Science
Lines: 65

In article <7209@pkmab.se> ske@pkmab.se (Kristoffer Eriksson) writes:
>In article <1992Sep22.043249.4954@meteor.wisc.edu> tobis@meteor.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis) writes:
>>I think psychology must proceed from consciousness as an axiom.

>Ah. If consciousness is just an axiom, then what is to prevent me from
>axiomatically declaring me and my computer the only conscious entities
>in the world? If you can find an answer to why that would be a worse
>solution that declaring that all humans are conscious, then perhaps,
>it doesn't need to be given as an axiom.

Subjectively, your proposal seems inappropriate, but I can provide no
objective objection (linguistic aside: hmmmm....) to your claim. 

>> I think error in either case is apalling:
>>failing to grant rights to a conscious entity would be awful, but granting
>>rights to a nonentity seems to me far more dangerous.

>This way you could argue that no-one at all, except you, should be accepted
>as conscious.

Well, there are practical problems with implementing that policy. Solipsism
is generally rejected not because it is disprovable but because it is
impractical. In practice, most of us strongly suspect that most others
of us are conscious, and we proceed from there.

(On Star Trek, most people believe the android Data to be conscious, and
grant it rights accordingly. This turns out well in general, but occasionally
a bug or security flaw renders this judgement disastrous. My sympathy goes
to the Evil Robotics Expert who referred to the android as "it", and thought
it ludicrous to grant the thing an officer's commission. Granting rights
to constructs "whose" putative experience we have no access to, even by
analogy, is madly reckless.)

>> Unless and until you can come up with such a test, I think we
>>have to assume that all of our overblown toasters are just toasters, and
>>all of the people are conscious.

>You have not justified your arbitrary choice of drawing the line bewteen
>people and everything else, in stead of somewhere else. Why not, for
>instance, draw it between white people and colored people, as some have
>done in the past? The point is: All you are left with, with your way of
>handling consciousness, as to what is conscious and what is not, is an
>arbitrary choice. 

Well, more or less. All I am left with is an intuitive, that is to say,
subjective choice. Unfortunately, the Turing Test and all such alternatives
are equally subjective, and I do not see how an objective test can be
possible.

Assume an objective test were possible whether an entity had a subjective
experience. How could we validate the test? Only by comparison with our
subjective impressions! 

Please note that self-report of consciousness is not identical
to consciousness. Counterexample:

	main(){printf("Yes, I am conscious!\n");}

>And in particular, your arguments seem to lead to the
>conclusions, that a better state of affairs in that regard, is not
>possible, not even in theory.

Agreed. That you may dislike my conclusions does not invalidate them though.

mt


