[extropy-chat] Reductionism

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 04:10 PM 11/26/2004 -0500, Eliezer wrote:
> 
>> Name me a single concept I must use, for which I cannot give an 
>> experimentally testable consequence of its presence or absence.
> 
> Friendliness.
> 
> (And watch out for those Type I and Type II errors.)

Presence: you live
Absence: you die

I didn't say it would be a perfect test that caught every case and only 
those cases.  I just said there would be an experimentally testable 
consequence.

> I will go as far as to suggest sentience. I am aware of the Turing test and
> many of the other debates that have been made here regarding that topic and
> I don't think thae it has been sufficiently demonstrated by anyone that it
> can be tested for.

Presence: beings spontaneously begin talking about conscious experiences 
without having been deliberately prompted to imitate human discourse
Absence: they don't

This is a poor test, but a critical one, because it demonstrates that 
zombies are logically impossible.  Consciousness produces at least one 
effect on the universe: it makes human philosophers talk about 
consciousness.  If you subtract something and human philosophers still talk 
about consciousness, the word "consciousness" must not refer to whatever it 
is you subtracted, because it is not the cause producing those thoughts 
that make philosophers put down physical words on paper about 
consciousness.  It's got to be woven into the chain of cause and effect 
somewhere - the reason and explanation and pattern that make the syllables 
"consciousness" fall from your physical lips.

So I reasoned when I was sixteen.  Today I have other perspectives that are 
harder to explain.  But I lived by the law of experimental testability, 
then and now; and though it did not cure *all* my silliness, it made me 
less silly than the likes of Searle.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence