From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Thu Dec 02 1999 - 08:34:23 MST
I've never yet ventured into one of these qualia
discussions, but I thought I'd just add my two cents for once.
It seems to me that the essential question is: "What does it
feel like to be a rock?" Or a star, or a plant, etc. We know
it feels like something to be living humans, at least we
presume this is true for most of us. So either:
1) Everything has something it feels like to be it, or
2) Only some things have something if feels like to be them.
If 1, my question about rocks makes sense. If 2, then
we face the hard question of which things feel and which
things don't. As far as I can tell, no one is anywhere close
to answering these questions. Sure, it might be reasonable to
suppose that a computer emulating a human brain will feel like
a brain does. But it is not that easy to objectively decide
which things in the universe are "computers," nor to decide
which programs if run would "feel." Even rocks compute
something.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:55 MST