Monist vs. Dualist Experiment?

[pocaracas]

What is software but ideas imbued into a physical mechanism? It is exactly BECAUSE the people who make Windows are already sentient, and already experience qualia, that they can formulate such a thing and imprint it onto the mechanism of a computer, which could normally not do anything.

hmmmm, it seems computers are able to learn... software can evolve beyond it's original programming...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning

Maybe the current technology is still lacking somewhat, but it seems clear that someday... someday, we'll have our skynet.

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Errrr.... so you base it on the fact that you are addressing another human being?.... what was that about zombies a few days ago?

I'm back at defining qualia as something purposefully unreachable, and as a consequence nothing more than mental masturbation...

Right. My acceptance of the qualia of others is a philosophical assumption, based on my social instinct and philosophical pragmatism. It's not something I was able to infer by objective means.

As for qualia being "purposely unreachable," I didn't make the universe, or the human mind. I didn't decide that my qualia would be unreachable by others-- I have just noticed that it is the case.
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Well, my position is based on the fact that nothing like such qualia can be found... as you say, it cannot be measured on others, it's just your own.... it is never found out of a brain... hence it must be a result of that brain's functioning.
How so? I can't tell.
Like I said long ago, the brain is way too complex for us to measure it accurately.
Even if we would measure it, it would take quite a feat of reverse engineering to make sense of the humongous amount of information that would come from that.
It would then be possible to distinguish low lever tasks, from higher level ones, discern all the ways that those tasks or processes intermingle to produce sensations, memories, recalls, reasoning, instinct, reflex, awareness, etc...

Until such technology is available, this is an open question. My intuition points to monism, yours to dualism.
Perhaps we'll be fortunate to live long enough to see which one of us has the right intuition.
Most likely, it will come in the form of a realistic android, at least a realistically thinking one.