RE: What's the point of philosophy any more?
March 23, 2018 at 4:46 am
(This post was last modified: March 23, 2018 at 4:50 am by bennyboy.)
Is AI consciousness? I wouldn't say so, or at least I have no reason to believe so. I define consciousness as the awareness of being, not as information processing.
Psychology and neuroscience are great, but they provide a study in correlation: this or that brain part or process is connected to reports of this or that experience, for example. What it doesn't do is to allow us to know whether an arbitrary non-organic-brain-based system experiences qualia. It's fine to study brains, or even information processing in general, but so long as people are interested in that fairly mysterious property of self-knowing that has traditionally been called consciousness, then you have to acknowledge that the science does not very effectively address it.
You talk about the "real world," but I don't think you can define what that even means, at least not precisely. Is the flat surface of my desk real? If so, in what way is it so? In what sense is consciousness related to brain function, exactly? How does consciousness emerge from any physical system, under any process? What, exactly IS a subatomic particle? What does it look like? How does it manifest? You are going to have a really hard time establishing that our Universe is more than the ideas through which we describe it.
Here's the thing. You have limited your thinking to a scope which is defined by a particular philosophical choice-- and then complain that philosophical choices are a waste of your time. You don't get to do that.
Psychology and neuroscience are great, but they provide a study in correlation: this or that brain part or process is connected to reports of this or that experience, for example. What it doesn't do is to allow us to know whether an arbitrary non-organic-brain-based system experiences qualia. It's fine to study brains, or even information processing in general, but so long as people are interested in that fairly mysterious property of self-knowing that has traditionally been called consciousness, then you have to acknowledge that the science does not very effectively address it.
You talk about the "real world," but I don't think you can define what that even means, at least not precisely. Is the flat surface of my desk real? If so, in what way is it so? In what sense is consciousness related to brain function, exactly? How does consciousness emerge from any physical system, under any process? What, exactly IS a subatomic particle? What does it look like? How does it manifest? You are going to have a really hard time establishing that our Universe is more than the ideas through which we describe it.
Here's the thing. You have limited your thinking to a scope which is defined by a particular philosophical choice-- and then complain that philosophical choices are a waste of your time. You don't get to do that.
