[ExI] Newbie Question: Consciousness and Intelligence

[Stefano Vaj]

On 13 February 2010 23:42, Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- On Sat, 2/13/10, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What about flatworms?
>
> I can't know what it's like to be a flatworm

Nor can you know what it is like to be a woman, a chinese, an
octuagenarian, or for that matter an identical twin of yourself.

What you can tell, however, is that they are in principle able to
succeed in a Turing test. ;-)

Do you really need to make further assumptions as to hypothetical
non-phenomenical features shared by them but not by other entities who
may be able to pass it just as well?

I am not trying to persuade you, as others seem unrelently to be
doing, that a computer can be "conscious". I am simply insisting that
any such immaterial feature that can be "projected" on other living
organisms, or on the restricted subset thereof represented by alert,
non-infant, educated, Turing-test qualified human beings can be with
identical plausibility projected on anything else exhibiting a good
enough analogy of the interactions you can have with them.

-- 
Stefano Vaj