[ExI] Digital Consciousness .

[John Clark]

On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 Gordon <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I think all this talk about qualia is pretty pointless
>

For once we agree. The problem is that the qualia fans around here can't
even explain the general sort of explanation they claim to be looking for.
Suppose we say that A produced B and B produced C [...] and Y produced Z
and Z produced qualia; well people on this list will say that explains
nothing because Z is not qualia. There is no way to win that argument
because no argument would satisfy them even in theory, so it's time to get
out of that infinite loop and think about other things.

> when you finally realize that as far as we know, only organic brains, or
> synthetic organic brains, are possibly able to make them.
>

Brains? Why was that in the plural?

> We need to understand the brain before we can hope to duplicate one.
>

Why?

 > It's pretty naive, I think, to suppose that we can create one even
> before we know how they work.
>

People first created Aspirin and used it to relieve pain in 1897, but only
in the last decade have we started to understand how it works. And people
have been using hot things to give off light since the stone age, but it
was only with Planck in 1900 did we figure out how that worked.

  John K Clark
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