Posts by BenWilson
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Certainly zoos are primarily for our entertainment, but I don't think they are particularly cruel to most animals these days. The animal loses freedom but gains security, and for a lot of wild animals that's actually quite a big improvement in quality of life. Consider how most wild animals die - it's not peacefully in a nice cage being hand-fed by loving keepers. It's either cruel slaughter, or hunger, or sickness, very often after being driven from the pack or getting injured. The endless struggle for life in the wild may appeal to our romantic instincts, but few of us would choose it. I think there's anthropomorphism going on when we suggest that the animals feel objectified. Personally if a bunch of animals hung around feeding me in a nice safe cage, I'd soon learn to ignore them looking at me. I'm sure I'd yearn for a bit more space, but we all do that anyway.
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Yup, sorry man, the pixies have never been confirmed, and every unicorn so far has been a hoax.
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Finally something I might understand, if I was brave enough to think about it, in this thread.
Lucky you. I didn't understand it, I just said it. Android uc.
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I'm always amazed by people who don't like zoos.
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With the ability now to image in real time thoughts as they occur in the brain there's lots of interesting stuff being discovered.
That sounds cools. What is meant by 'image'? Are you talking about tracking brain activity during various tasks?
We can postulate a being that functioned just like a person but just ran automatically rather than 'experiencing'. I'm not saying it's actually possible or not, just that the concepts are distinct.
The concepts are indeed distinct but what they refer to might not exist. Unicorns are different ideas to pixies, but neither one seems to exist.
We could not know that the 'being', if it was truly 'functionally equivalent' to a person, was having experiences or not. If they were functionally equivalent they would talk about having experiences. If they did not know, for instance, what pain felt like, then they would have trouble understanding a lot of human emotions, and would not seem equivalent at all. But 'what pain feels like' may be just a description of a bunch of inputs that conflict with the being's goals, one of which is probably to remain intact. And maybe it is for me too, certainly strong pain feels much like 'wow, massive signals of damage, which I don't want' to me.
The trouble is that the whole way that we talk about consciousness presumes its existence. It's hard to find language to talk about a void mind which appears functionally equivalent to a human. The closest I get to knowing what void is like is considering the times when I'm deeply asleep and not dreaming. I can't remember it. I can't describe the feeling of it, because so far as I can tell there are no feelings, other than the most basic ones like discomfort (which may cause me to roll over), and I can only remember them if they wake me up. But at those times the only kind of human I'm functionally equivalent to is another one that's asleep. I wouldn't be able to pass a Turing test, that's for sure.
It may not be possible to make language in which talking about consciousness does make sense. Language is about communication, and in this case we are trying to communicate something which may be incommunicable - what it is to 'be me'. The most that you can really say about it is that it's much like 'being you'. But you'd only be guessing when you said it.
That's why I've always like the Zen approach to consciousness, which seems to me pretty much to be "Just experience it. Talking about it may fool you into thinking you get it, but you would be getting it about as much as an expert on swimming who had never been in the water"
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In fact what you're saying is quite congruent with what a lot of postmodernists have been saying (which is what I suggested above with the 'thus were launched...').
I know. I only pretend to dislike postmodernists.They have some interesting points. My main problem is that it's a whole lot of effort to get to the points. It seems to be a consequence of insisting on witty poetic writing, which is nice to appreciate from an artistic point of view but it can get in the way of communicating ideas. Anglo-american styles of philosophy are much more about communicating in a very systematic and step-by-step way. I get the impression that postmodernists are not really about the individual points, but seem to be trying to convince you of an entire world view with every sentence. Which makes them seem like idealistic middle management consultants getting in the way of people who really are diligently getting on with a complicated project. Perhaps I'm wrong, maybe they are making real progress.
What frustrated me was that he didn't define 'thinking' but implied that it was formal symbolic reasoning with grammar.
Yes, I always find that one annoying having spent years and years actually doing formal symbolic reasoning with grammar and seeing what a small part it really is of intelligent behaviour, and furthermore how few really intelligent people can actually do it properly. Expert systems and other AI inventions had the reasoning and grammar parts down pat years and years ago, but would you trust one to advise you on, say, your health? I wouldn't. The knowledge itself is the hard-won part, and how we come by it, advance it, and use it, is way more than a simple matter of logic.
Odd thread in which to have the conversation tho'
Yes, I don't know how we got on to this! Looking back it all came about from trying to work out if Key is a robot. Pretty tenuous.
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Kracklite, there's a place for thought experiments. I don't think this is an example of it. Searle just comes across to me as naive, as someone who doesn't get that people really were working on this stuff and understanding it, rather than insisting it couldn't be done because of thought experiments that are highly disputable.
My take on consciousness is pretty simple. It's not scientific. You could be not conscious, and no-one else would know. Your conscious may go to heaven when you die - only you will ever know. You could be the only conscious in a world of meat machines. You could even not be conscious and just think you are.
Thought and communication are another matter. They are an evolutionary explosion.
> It may seem that way to a human but it sure doesn't to an engineer.
Um, you might want to consider the implications of that sentence.
I did, it's an engineer's joke.
And the squishy side is very, very important, I totally agree. I don't know that we could say it's the most important thing, but it's probably the least well understood, and yet a huge part of what makes us human. But 'higher reason' by which I pretty much subscribe to Chomsky's take on it being nearly synonymous with recursive language use, is what separates us from other animals, and so it is also a huge part of our humanity.
I think it's pretty much a continuum - that reason and intuition are tightly bound together, and intelligence spills over boundaries that are not defined by our skins. Without all the resources of my office I'm nowhere near as intelligent in any productive sense. The notes I've written, the code I've cut, that's all part of what I consider my mind. Even the posts I've made on this blog are my mind, hopefully a shared part.
That does not mean I'm post-anything. I'm still scientist who believes in progress, and wants to be part of it, rather than giving up on it, or turning it back even. That I think most thought is quite possibly undefinable in a practical sense and thus perfect communication is impossible does not mean that I think communicating and thinking are a waste of time, or just an animal expression of prejudice. More accurate would be to say our minds are a fantastically complicated universe and understanding them fully is about as elusive as a general field theory is to physicists - something they know how to get, but also know they won't get for a very, very long time, if ever.
If I have to wear the label of modernist and incur the wrath of hundreds of thousands of angry post-whatnots in language I can't understand, so be it.
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You think Redbaiter is his real name and he just uses Andrew Llewellyn when he's dressed up like a human?
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Don't ever get caught up a dark alley facing a mob of chain-wielding, flickknife flashing librarians.
Look out! The Dewey gang's here.
They'll file your arse under D for Deceased.
Obviously I wasn't running down librarians, who themselves can and do use Google. Just saying that what was a rare and sought after ability to know every last book in the library, where it is and what it's about, is now only a click away. Which actually makes librarians work much more interesting and probably valuable too.
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I seem to recall there was some dispute as to whether he was just thrown, or if he was drunk, struggling with the bouncers, and then fell down the stairs (and quite possibly they made very little attempt to catch him).
That's a bit like splitting hairs over whether someone died because you punched them, or because their head hit the ground. You shouldn't tussle with people at the top of a flight of stairs, and if you are going to manhandle them down the stairs they should be well under control. But of course you can always claim that you feared for your own safety when you get in a fight on stairs.
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