(November 29, 2012 at 3:07 pm)apophenia Wrote: There's actually another way.
If what we call consciousness is an effect of a set of brain processes which we can describe and characterize, and whose function we can understand, verifying consciousness in another entity would largely be simply a matter of verifying that a similar aggregate process is present in that entity.
Certainly, that's true. I think, in a practical sense, we will probably duplicate the effect (or create a convincing facsimile of it) by chance before we understand it in that level of detail, however.
