Mind reading

Personally, I think that people do not take seriously enough the arguments advanced by the likes of J.R. Lucas, Roger Penrose, David Chalmers et al that use the halting problem/Gdel Incompleteness to substantiate the non-computability of consciousness.It seems obvious to me that the contents of private thoughts can never be fully captured in terms of exterior states. Certainly, a measure of pleasure centers in a subject's brain might indicate roughly if he is feeling "happy" or "good," for example, but even the most complete description of a brain-state will never communicate to an observer the actual feelings of the subject, and that's what thoughts are fundamentally: feelings. Feelings are inherently subjective, and for that reason objective descriptions of them can never contain all of their information. Knowing all the physical facts about a person's experience will not induce the experience itself. The actual experiences -- called "qualia" -- contain facts that are not physically describable.

Yeah, I probably coulda guessed. Most people do. Seems to be the prevailing mantra around here. So what? Who said that the material expression is the whole of the experience? Seems like you're begging the question here. Again, so what? Your statements seem to carry a hidden presumption of ontological materialism which -- since it is this ontology being challenged -- begs the question.Look at it this way: The only reason we believe that the objective, material word exists outside of our own respective individual consciousness is because we presuppose a priori that solipsism is false. There are no experiences that are incompatible with solipsism so we must simply assume a priori that the external world exists. Your argument that descriptions of external states capture all of the facts rides upon this assumption. In other words, the idea that there is any externality at all lacks any non-circular basis in external reality. The presupposition that the entire universe exists as a manifestation of your individual consciousness has just as much basis in reality as the presupposition that other consciousnesses exists outside your own. It's just as valid. That's the essence of the zombie argument. Every individual in the entire universe might in fact be a zombie lacking all subjective experience and there'd be no way to know it. Since there is no objective difference between a zombie and a conscious human, there must be real facts about consciousness that are not describable in objective terms, namely, qualia. Unsubstantiatled assertion, and in fact contrindicated by the anti-computationalist arguments of Lucas, Penrose, Chalmers, Seager, etc.I'll concede that it is true to say that objectively thoughts and feelings are expressed as chemical and electrical interactions, however objectivity ignores the subjective experience -- and it's THOSE facts that functionalist explanations sweep under the carpet as though they weren't real.

I suggest visting here:http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/online.html

Nonsense. Dream experience, for one, hints at the deeper qualities of consciousness. There we have experiences of totally convincing realities that, while appearing as real and as valid as normal waking reality, have no substantiation in the external world. You misunderstand. I'm dealing with a priori knowledge, not any type of testing of external reality. The point is to show that there is a priori factual knowledge accessible to conscious individuals that is unassailable through empricial discovery. To insist that one should empirically discover that which is posited to be beyond the reach of empirical discovery in order to demonstrate that the discovery is indeed beyond empiricism is to reveal a flawed understanding of the principles involved. Such as...? This is not the point. The point is merely that there are facts which are known but which cannot be empirically discovered and validated. This does not invalidate things which ARE empirically validated, but simply acknowledges certain things which are factual and real yet outside of empirical reach. Again, I'm not saying that anything in reality is false, I'm simply arguing that there is more to reality than materialism. The material world is what exists "on the outside of things," so to speak, but I'm arguing that there is a valid realm of knowledge "on the inside of things." I think it is obvious that such exists when one considers the primacy of individual consciousness as it regards experience, and that was where the problem of solipsism became relevant. I have no idea how this is relevant. Maybe it would make sense to me were I a theist. To be frank, I'm not certain that you grasped the argument because the introduction of solipsism at the start of that paragraph was meant as a prelude to the zombie argument that you snipped and didn't even address. Regardless, I'm disappointed that you seem reluctant to actually face the problem of solipsism since it is a real problem, and instead can only offer strawmen and handwaving coupled with a thinly-veiled insult.You obviously have not contested that solipsism is unfalsifiable, which therefore means that you do not contest that the notion of there existing any reality at all independent of your individual consciousness is an a priori postulation lacking all basis in objective reality. For that reason, the so-called "zombie world" or "solipsist's world" -- the world wherein there are no other conscious individuals but only organisms which behave as though they were conscious -- is objectively indifferentiable from a world where consciousnesses exist separately from yours.Therefore, if we *are* to suppose that there exists an external reality and separately existing consciousnesses, we must admit that there are real facts about those consciousnesses that we cannot assail empirically. This conclusion follows because the two worlds are objectively identical, and the only difference is that one contains consciousness. We can't objectively differentiate one world from the other, therefore we must conclude that the differentiating element -- consciousness -- is not objectively assailable.Do you dispute the points that I made regarding the indifferentiability of a world full of zombies vs. a truly conscious humans? If so, on what basis? And please, try to withold any more rebuttals that trail along the lines of "This is why it would suck real bad if what you say is true." If you mean that you think my computer has conscious experiences, I don't really disagree with you. If you think that the computer's conscious experience is fully described by it's formalized circuitry, I do disagree.This message has been edited by ::, 07-26-2004 06:26 PM