[ExI] Mental Phenomena

[William Flynn Wallace]

So if enough AI's said the same thing, particularly if they were vastly
smarter than me, I take their word they were experiencing a vision of a
strawberry too.  john

Giving you an answer that is intelligent is far from having an experience
like a human.  I think the default should be that only flesh and blood
creatures can have experiences and consciousness.  I don't see rows of 1s
and 0s as having anything other than an electrical charge in their memories.

Why do we keep pretending that we know something about consciousness?  It's
the 12 blind men, but the elephant is imaginary.

bill w

On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 4:25 PM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 4:27 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> > What makes anyone think that a machine can experience anything?
>>
>
> Intelligent behavior. When they are behaving in that way I believe my
> fellow human beings are experiencing something, and when they are not
> behaving in that way, such as when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or
> dead, I believe they are not experiencing anything.
>
>
>> > Do we know that?  I don't think so.
>>
>
> What's with this "we" business? I can only speak for myself but no, I
> don't "know" that, I don't claim this is a rock solid logical principle
> that always works, it's just a rule of thumb. But it's all I've got and all
> I'll ever have so it will just have to do.
>
>
>> > If enough humans say that they are experiencing a vision of a
>> strawberry, I'd take their word for it.
>>
>
> Although not provably correct that's sounds like a perfectly reasonable
> course of action to me, after all in the real world we can almost never be
> certain of anything but we must proceed nevertheless and do the best we
> can. So if enough AI's said the same thing, particularly if they were
> vastly smarter than me, I take their word they were experiencing a vision
> of a strawberry too.
>
>
>> > I would assume not all would lie.  I assume nothing about a machine
>> except that it is not a living thing and cannot be.
>>
>
> Life is notoriously difficult to define and there is no reason to even try
> to do so because that's not really what we're interested in, what we're
> talking about is intelligence and its accompanying phenomenon
> consciousness. Of course I don't have a definition of "intelligent
> behavior" that's worth a damn either but that's OK because I have something
> much better than definitions, examples. Intelligent behavior is the sort of
> activity that Einstein engaged in.
>
> If you don't like intelligent behavior as a marker for consciousness what
> is the alternative? Only humans that have the same skin color as me are
> conscious? Only humans that have the same sex as me are conscious? Only
> entities whose data processing center is wet and squishy like mine is can
> be conscious, not dry and hard like a computer's is?
>
> John K Clark
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