Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!dimacs.rutgers.edu!mips!wdl1.wdl.fac.com!wdl1!mikeb From: mikeb@wdl31.wdl.fac.com (Michael H Bender) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Definition of (was Re: Testing for []) consciousness Message-ID: Date: 25 Oct 90 15:40:58 GMT References: <27608@usc.edu> <1990Oct22.150143.13858@canon.co.uk> <26910@cs.yale.edu> Sender: root@wdl1.wdl.fac.com (SUPER USER) Organization: Ford Aerospace, Western Development Laboratories Lines: 36 In-Reply-To: mcdermott-drew@cs.yale.edu's message of 24 Oct 90 17:18:37 GMT Nntp-Posting-Host: wdl31 McDermott ends his letter with a delightful, ironic, comment: Manifesto: Nothing is entirely subjective. Show me an unobservable something and I'll show you a nothing. -- Drew McDermott I.e., show me nothing and I will show you nothing! However, I suggest that the debate over whether consciousness is or isn't observable is missing the point. After all, we have never observed a black hole yet physicists have no doubt of its existence! In the physical sciences an abstraction will be accepted iff there is a theory or theories that use it to explain other phenomena. If the theories are simple enough, elegant enough, useful enough, the abstraction will be accepted; otherwise, it won't. Thus, the debate should really be whether there are observable behaviors which can best be explained by consciousness. For instance, I do not know of any reasonable theory, to date, to explain the fact that on occasion, humans have been observed to completely change their goals and the associated behavior, without any apparent cause (external or internal). An example might be one of those rare occasions a person gets up some morning and completely changes significant parts of his behavior (e.g., gets divorced, commits suicide, etc.). I have not come up with any useful explanation of this phenomenon, so far, that does not rely, at least partially, on some form of consciousness. Certainly lower level animals do not seem to have this same amount of freedom in their behavior. But getting back to McDermott's original (ironic) manifesto -- the problem with it is that it is temporally restrictive. I.e., just because you can't see something now doesn't mean that you won't be able to see something in the future. E.g., suppose that by the year 3000 we have developed a unified "psychic" field theory which allows us to use some currently unknown "energies" to observe another person's subjective mental state. Wouldn't this allow us to "see" something subjective? Mike Bender