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Philosophical zombie.
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"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice."
Charles Robert Darwin, Letter to Asa Gray (22 may 1860)  (June 7, 2017 at 12:27 pm)robybar Wrote: But if consciousness rose from complexity, and a pz HAS to be complex enough in order to produce human-like responses, then, it necessairily HAS to have a consciousness. That's a big 'if'. I don't believe that consciousness results from surpassing a certain threshhold of complexity alone. That doesn't seem to provide anything like a real explanation for consciousness. Just: complexity -> boom, consciousness! ![[Image: extraordinarywoo-sig.jpg?rlkey=x1nmxbwrp...pouidnfvtl]](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl/fi/a6a72vica8gsyddmkhtxp/extraordinarywoo-sig.jpg?rlkey=x1nmxbwrpk9dzrupouidnfvtl) RE: Philosophical zombie.
June 8, 2017 at 8:12 am
(This post was last modified: June 8, 2017 at 8:23 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Some people would go the other way with that, and ask whether or not -we- are the p-zombies. I also wonder whether there's some threshold in which a system "wakes up" as it were, to consciousness..whereas before it was just complex processing, for example. It does seem as though complexity must play a part in some individual example of consciousness (I don't expect a cat to have quite as rich a consiousness as my own - but who knows, right?)..but it's fairly easy to suggest that the idea of a hard dividing line is bound up more in our language and how we think about this than in any evidence or data to support that conclusion.
Consciousness may be a sliding scale, but even then..I don't see how complexity, itself, makes it happen. Bridges are complex too. Plants are so complex our consciousness cannot fully comprehend or explain how they do what they do (and, to sweeten the pot, they demonstrably exhibit the recognizable behaviors of conscious creatures). Neither seems to be concious, at least, not in the way that we are - if we are, if there's a specific way. The whole subject is kind-of a rat's nest of tangled propositions. But, for agreement! I think that there; something incoherent about the p-zombie proposition myself. An entity that is not only equally complex, but equally complex in a host of specified ways? A creature, for example, with a brain just like ours (or it's equivalent)...with behaviors just like ours (or their equivalents)..and yet, not like us? That's like picking up two identical toasters..except that one of them is, mysteriously, a HAM radio.....
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
Yeah, I'm not sure that in order to mimic human behaviors accurately, you'd have to be as complex as a human anyway. Surely, things like reproduction and organic redundancy for survival don't really matter, since we're really just talking about a mind in a vehicle.
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