On 2/3/2014 5:02 PM, LizR wrote:
On 4 February 2014 13:57, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
wrote:
On 2/3/2014 4:03 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 3 February 2014 23:42, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
That's hard to say. I think conscious thought will be found to a class
of
thoughts and there will be degrees of consciousness and it will be
complicated
and the "Hard Problem" will be seen to have been overly simplistic. It
may
have an answer, like "If it can do induction or Cantor diagonalization
it's
conscious.", but that may be only one kind of consciousness and
probably not
the most interesting.
Maybe so, but that's still essentially about the public aspects, isn't it?
I guess
I'm asking if you think that, in the final analysis, any interesting
categorical
distinction will remain between the public behaviour that accompanies
consciousness
(however sophisticated the model) and the private experience of its
consequences in
one's own case. If such a distinction does remain, people (some of them
anyway)
will still no doubt feel that something has been left out of the
explanation. I
accept that many people even now see no need for any such distinction -
I've often
had trouble getting people who've never considered the matter to grasp what
is
meant by the HP.Do you personally simply reserve judgement, or do you tend
to swing
one way or the other?
I don't think experience will be explained away. It might be possible to
temporarily share experiences by some kind of brain-to-brain connection or
recorded
experiences. But they won't be exactly the same and they will still be
private
because they're partial. If this connection gave me exactly your
experience then
I'd be you and not me - at least until the connection were broken so I could
remember being me as well as the experience.
My science fictional imaginings include being able to record brain states - experiences
plus memories - and play them back to another brain.If that ever comes to pass, then the
person experiencing the playback would think and feel that they were the other person,
until the end of the recording.
Kind of scary, actually...
Or enlightening:
"Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursel's as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
And foolish notion"
- Robbie Burns
Brent
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