[ExI] Consciousness as 'brute fact' and meta-skepticism

[William Flynn Wallace]

John, you have entirely missed the point.  I said the measurement would not
tell you what consciousness is, but simply a way to measure it
objectively.  Without that there is no hope of making consciousness a
scientific entity.  If the measurements do not correlate with what we think
of with common sense as consciousness, then we choose another measurement.
bill w

On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 3:31 PM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 3:05 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> > Telling a person that intelligence is a score on an IQ test is very
>> unsatisfactory, but that is what ODs do.  You could, perhaps, define
>> consciousness by EEG tests,
>
>
> Although very far from perfect you can at least intuitively see a
> relationship of some sort between intelligence and the ability to do well
> on an IQ test, but squiggly lines on a EEG plot and consciousness have no
> intuitive relationship whatsoever and so would make for a very poor
> definition, operationally or otherwise. Although it would certainly be far
> easier to make a machine that would produce satisfactory squiggles than to
> make a machine that consistently exhibits intelagent behavior, and so at
> least as the word is defined we'd have a "conscious" computer much sooner.
> The only trouble is by defining the word in that way you would have leached
> out of it every last thing that made consciousness a desirable state to be
> in. I really really want to remain conscious, that is to say I don't want
> to die, I rather like doing well on IQ tests too, but I don't much care
> what sort of squiggly lines a EEG machine says my brain produces. If the
> machine said I wasn't conscious but my subjective qualia that only I have
> access to said I was I know which one I'd believe.
>
>  John K Clark
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