According to the sort of account you indicate, it may be possible to produce an artificial consciousness, e.g. in the form of a computer program. But that artificial consciousness would be a genuine consciousness produced by artificial means, not a mere simulation of consciousness.Simulated consciousness would be the (a) genuine article assuming a functionalist account of consciousness (not identity). It's a controversial stance (as is every other), but not obviously wrong. — SophistiCat
Along those lines, I might ask for a criterion to distinguish information-processing systems in general from conscious information-processing systems. — Cabbage Farmer
Before asking for a criterion one would have to justify the distinction. How do you prove that there is a difference at all? — Heiko
According to the sort of account you indicate, it may be possible to produce an artificial consciousness, e.g. in the form of a computer program. But that artificial consciousness would be a genuine consciousness produced by artificial means, not a mere simulation of consciousness. — Cabbage Farmer
According to the functionalist, anything that satisfies certain functional criteria of being conscious just is conscious. — SophistiCat
What larger cultural norms shape your response to someone else’s hair style? — Joshs
Of course Dennett doesn't say that 'consciousness is an illusion' in so many words, but it is the only reasonable surmise as to the implication of his ideas, which is that mind, or even being (as in, human being) is an illusory consequence of the co-ordinated activity of cellular and molecular processes which alone are real. He's a materialist, right? That's what materialism says. — Wayfarer
But he's denying qualia, clearly. — Manuel
As I said I take him to be denying that there are experiential entities, qualia, over and above the qualities that we find in things. I don't see how Dennett could seriously be thought to be denying that there are qualities that we routinely encounter and are aware of; tastes. colours, textures and so on. To deny that would be insane, and I don't believe Dennett is insane. — Janus
I take him to be just saying that those quantiies are not what we might think they are due to our intuitive tendency to reify and create superfluous entities via language. — Janus
What is "over and above" the qualities we find in things? Is there anything like that? All we can say about the world is going to be related to whatever happens to interact with our cognitive capacitates and sensations. — Manuel
That's just the thing, Dennett is far from being clear on what he stance is. Searle, Strawson, Tallis, McGinn, Goff, Kastrup and many others take Dennett to be denying these things. — Manuel
Clearly Dennett is smart, speaks well, gives good examples. But he's leaving plenty of room for doubt when he says "there seems to be qualia".
I take him to be just saying that those quantiies are not what we might think they are due to our intuitive tendency to reify and create superfluous entities via language. — Janus
What is the colour experience red, aside from our experience of it? We can proceed to speak of wave-lengths, but that's not colour experience. — Manuel
It seems there's no reason to suppose that packing more and more information-processing functions into a program would ever yield the sort of "subjective character" of experience that's said to generate the hard problem of consciousness.
John Searle has provided influential arguments along these lines dating back to 1980. ...
...But the simulation of mental states is no more a mental state than the simulation of an explosion is itself an explosion. — John Searle — Cabbage Farmer
According to our investigations there are electromagnetic wavelengths that give rise to seeing coloured things in suitably equipped percipients, but those wavelengths are not themselves consciously experienced, obviously. — Janus
The phenomenological perspective seems like the most constructive way to look at consciousness imo as it does away with dualism (or rather 'brackets' it out) rather than get sidetracked with this extrinsic question. — I like sushi
David Chalmers: 'First-person experience is such that it cannot be fully described in third-person terms. Experience is inherently subjective, it has a quality of "something it is like to be...", and that quality is inherently irreducible to an objective description.' — Wayfarer
To me, that description would've made sense if and only if it's the case that there's something inexplicable, in physical terms, about consciousness. That, I'm afraid, isn't the case. — TheMadFool
In the materialistic framework it's obviously called an illusion — GraveItty
Illusions are errors in consciousness. Only a sentient being capable of judgement can be subject to them. — Wayfarer
But that is an assertion, not an argument. — Wayfarer
It seems there's no reason to suppose that packing more and more information-processing functions into a program would ever yield the sort of "subjective character" of experience that's said to generate the hard problem of consciousness. — Cabbage Farmer
Then I am embarrassed for not making it clear I wasn’t talking about flavor. — Mww
That you like cauliflower now, but dislike it later, are each nonetheless aesthetic judgements. That you are fickle with respect to your feelings regarding cauliflower over time, does not carry over to the fickle-ness of the judgements regarding the stuff, insofar as each judgement arises simultaneously with, and necessarily representative of, the feeing. — Mww
Dunno - if the experience is thought as some kind of "detector", does that notion make sense? Given: the vocabulary is obviously different. — Heiko
where wishful thinking often dooms sensible ideas thoughts on the matter. — I like sushi
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