Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!neuron.cis.ohio-state.edu!pja From: pja@neuron.cis.ohio-state.edu (Peter J Angeline) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Conciousness Message-ID: Date: 26 Apr 91 14:41:55 GMT References: <1991Apr16.061532.10775@panix.uucp> <2102@seti.inria.fr> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: pja@cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 58 In-reply-to: ziane@nuri.inria.fr's message of 24 Apr 91 18:51:22 GMT In article <2102@seti.inria.fr> ziane@nuri.inria.fr (ziane mikal @) writes: > In reply to the article cited above, I agree that conciousness > may be a more interesting problem, since intelligence has > kind of lost SOME of its mystery. Whoops! I disagree completely. While we have identified some interesting phenomina, intelligence is still a very dark and deep problem. But we can still talk about your other thoughts regardless. > On the other hand, I have another puzzling problem, > namely pleasure and pain. > If a computer can simulate pain or pleasure, does it really mean > that it really suffers or feels pleasure. This is the same question as "If a computer simulates a mind then does it have a mind?" If you believe Strong AI people (Haugeland, Newell and Simon, Fodor, Pylyshyn), then yes, computer simulation of a physical procees is tantamount to any interpretation which can be placed on the simulation consistently. Thus a computer would "feel" pain if a simulation of pain was consistently interpretable as the physical process of "pain". (See Newell's papers on Physical Symbol Systems.) However, If you believe people such as Searle, Steven Harnad or the Dreyfus brothers, simulation is not sufficient to posess the characteristic simulated. For instance, simulating a hurricane by computer doesn't get the chips wet. Searle's chinese room experiment is one attempt to philosophically address this question and has direct import to yours. As usual, it all comes down to who you WANT to believe. Personally, I choose to believe > Why is pain, painful ?! > Pain almost seems an absolute measure of bad. I suppose the best answer is that pain is unpleasent to an organism as a signal to that organism that whatever it did to lead to the pain is not healthy for it to repeat. It's evolution's method of feedback to an individual organism, which could be interpreted as "an absolute measure of bad" with the end of the scale being "death". > I mean that one may not care about somebody else's pain > but that guy cannot deny that this is really a problem for the > suffering being. I can deny it since I can't experience it except by that person either telling me or me infering that a person is in pain from their actions. Either way I am removed from the phenomina because I can't experience what the other person is experienceing within his own body. This is the classic "other minds" problem from philosophy and is fairly hopeless. > Mikal. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter J. Angeline ! Laboratory for AI Research (LAIR) Graduate Research Assistant ! THE Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210 ARPA: pja@cis.ohio-state.edu ! "Nature is more ingenious than we are."