From: David Blenkinsop (blenl@sk.sympatico.ca)
Date: Wed Jun 23 1999 - 09:43:42 MDT
Timothy Bates wrote:
>
> >blah blah blah.
>
> the only hard problem, IMHO, is keeping all the philosophers who want to
> waste our lives talking about the hard problem instead of solving the series
> of "easy" problems, which is all there really is.
>
> This "hard problem" phrase is really just an ambit claim for high
> intellectual ground, ie., "oh yes, but you biopsych's only study the
> non-hard problem ..."
>
> tim
>
> ____________________
> ZhuangZi: Look how happy those fish are!
> HuiZi: You're not a fish; how can you know they are happy?
> ZhuangZi: You're not me; how do you know I don't know?
I agree, in the sense that there's a persistent illusion of a "hard'
consciousness problem, or a perceived need for conscious perceptions to
have a uniquely special status of some sort. Look at some of Searles'
arguments about "semantic contents" for instance, he might as well be
talking about ectoplasm or some other kind of ghostly stuff. Here on
this list, we've got high intellectual ground arguments of a comparable
nature, where maybe perfectly smart ET's wouldn't be conscious because
of not having the right ectoplasm, or excuse me, because maybe they
wouldn't have the right sort of super hypothetical physics connection,
or something.
I've been inspired by reading Dennett's book _Kinds of Minds_, he does
interesting arguments about how evolutionary process relates to the
development of mind capabilities, it's all part of what he calls the
Tower of Generate and Test. Meanwhile, if we really want to get back to
basics, we should recognize that our mental processes are in themselves
real-world computational events, and therefore no *less* real than
anything else in the universe. In other words, "I think, therefore I
think". Also "how do you know that I don't know whether a fish has
feelings", like hey man, that's right on!
David Blenkinsop <blenl@sk.sympatico.ca>
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