From: Jeff L Jones (jeff@spoonless.net)
Date: Mon Mar 24 2008 - 16:31:24 MDT
On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 1:00 PM, J. Andrew Rogers
<andrew@ceruleansystems.com> wrote:
> So what *should* we be talking about?
I haven't been on this list that long, so I won't presume to tell
anyone what they should or shouldn't talk about on SL4. But I would
argue that if you're interested in building a machine that can pass
the Turing test, consciousness is irrelevant. And by that I mean...
consciousness is a word that different people apply to different
things, just like "gross" is a word that different people apply to
different things. I mostly see it as an "intentional stance" (as
Dennett would say) you can adopt towards complex things. And when
superhuman intelligence arises, it will likely unleash the full fury
of the singularity whether or not any unmodified humans agree that the
posthumans are "conscious". So in that sense, it is irrelevant for
discussions about the technological singularity. I would suggest
talking more about things like intelligence and machine learning.
I do agree that it's interesting from a philosophical standpoint to
ask what is meant by the word consciousness. And maybe you're asking
me what types of things should we think about to get more of an
intuition for that? I don't know... maybe more neuroscience or
psychology experiments?
Jeff
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