[ExI] Chalmers

[John Clark]

Brent, I don't see how that changes what I said, everything that you do and
everything a AI does and everything anything does either happens for a
reason and thus is subject to cause and effect or it doesn't happen for a
reason and thus is random. So you're doomed to failure if you try to imbue
words like "volition" or "choice" with some sort of mystical power that
only something that is wet and squishy like humans have but something that
is dry and hard like a computer never could.

And a Avatar style neural ponytail would certainly be an interesting gadget
but I don't see how it could solve and of the philosophical problems you're
talking about. I don't see how such a neural ponytail could falsify
solipsism, if I used it to merge with a worm the human/worm hybrid might be
conscious but it could be argued that it was the human part that was doing
all the heavy lifting and making all of the magical conscious mojo juice. I
might also use it with a bat as in the famous thought experiment and learn
what it's like to be a bat/human hybrid, but I still wouldn't know what
it's like to be a pure non-hybrid 100% bat living in the wild in a cave.
And you and I might try it and then John Allsop would know what it's like
to be Brent Clark, but Brent Allsop still wouldn't know what it's like to
be John Clark, to do that you'd have to change your brain so it's identical
to John Clark's but then you wouldn't be Brent Allsop anymore, you'd be
John Clark.

I have yet to hear even a hint of a reason why humans can be intelligent
and conscious but computers can only be conscious; and if you can have one
without the other I can't see how Darwinian Evolution managed to come up
with a conscious creature like me because Evolution can only see
intelligence, it can't directly detect consciousness any better than you or
I can so natural selection can't produce it unless it's the byproduct of
something that it can see.  Something like intelligence.

 John K Clark
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