[ExI] Digital Consciousness .

[Anders Sandberg]

On 24/04/2013 10:16, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 12:07:08AM -0700, Gordon wrote:
>>
>> You certainly know you have intentionality.
> No, as a matter of fact I don't.
>
> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/ is useless, it's
> not even wrong. About every sentence of it makes my skin crawl.
> "Power"? Measured in Watts, or what? "minds", well, how
> perfectly circular. "to be about" is meaningless. "Or to stand for"

Eugene, part of this is merely terminology. Power in philosophy is 
something different than in physics, just as it means something very 
different in sociology or political science.

Then again, I am unsure if intentionality actually denotes anything, or 
whether it denotes a single something. It is not uncontroversial even 
within the philosophy of mind community.


> "The word itself, which is of medieval Scholastic origin,"
> ah, so they admit it's useless.

Ah, just like formal logic. Or the empirical method.


> See, something is fishy with your concept of consciosness. If we look 
> at at as ability to process information, suddenly we're starting to 
> get somewhere. 

Maybe. Defining information and processing is nearly as tricky. Shannon 
and Kolmogorov doesn't get you all the way, since it is somewhat 
problematic to even defining what the signals are.

Measurability is not everything. There are plenty of risks that do not 
have well defined probabilities, yet we need and can make decisions 
about them with above chance success. The problem with consciousness, 
intentionality and the other theory of mind "things" is that they are 
subjective and private - you cannot compare them between minds.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University