From: Hal Finney (hal@rain.org)
Date: Thu Nov 19 1998 - 17:56:26 MST
Paul Hughes wrote:
> Having experimented quite a bit with float tanks, the brain certainly
> seems to have a need to continue to process information, whether of an
> external or internal nature. John Lilly recommend the tank experience
> for that reason - it allowed the user to process internal information that
> they would otherwise not be able to do amongst environmental distractions.
> In my experience, solutions to several problems I was working on in
> frustration, revealed themselves while I was in the tank.
Of course you would agree that you remained conscious. The point is,
Dennett appeared to be denying that a Turing machine could be conscious
unless it was interacting with its environment. It doesn't make much
sense for this to be the case with a Turing machine when it seems not
to apply to people.
I might add that it seems that it should be possible to engineer
resistance to hallucinations into an AI. Just because people eventually
begin to spin their mental wheels when deprived of the traction of
sensory experience doesn't imply that all beings would be that way.
I am skeptical that there is an iron law of consciousness that says that
all brains would behave this way when deprived of input.
Michael Lorrey wrote:
> I dunno. Think of a fetus. Do you know of any cases whatsoever where the fetus
> was aware and thinking while in the womb, which is a remarkable sensory
> deprivation chamber. A human being does not really become aware until at least
> a few weeks to a few months after being born. They need time to learn how to
> sort out all of the sensory imput into a rational format.
I had the impression that the question was whether consciousness requires
present-time interaction with the environment, not whether there was
interaction at any time in the past. The latter would be consistent
with Turing-machine functionalism, as I understand it. The question is,
can you take a program and stick it in a Turing machine, and thereby
make it conscious.
The source of the program is irrelevant for answering this question.
If any program has the property that running it on a Turing machine
produces consciousness, then Turing functionalism is true. If it
turns out that the only way to make such a program is by running an
interaction with the environment, fine; likewise for any other way of
creating the program. The source doesn't matter. All that matters,
for this question, is whether running a program can produce consciousness.
Hal
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