(October 31, 2013 at 7:35 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I can't assign likelihood to that thesis. You already know, though, that given a robot which behaves identically to a human, I'd be suspicious of whether it was really experiencing qualia or seeming to.
Assuming that you happen to know that all the brain functions of humans have been replicated in the robot - why would you be suspicious?
(October 31, 2013 at 7:35 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Gaining knowledge doesn't have to be scientific. But what about proving the validity of the knowledge you've aquired? I know, for example, that I experience qualia. How could I prove that to others, if they weren't willing on principle to take it as given?
What, for example, if I was a robot, and I woke up on the assembly line knowing the wonders of qualia? How could I convince that bennyboy guy I wasn't just blindly acting on my Windows 2043 programming?
Compare a blind man trying to relay visual information or a deaf man trying to relay auditory information. Without direct experience of the subject, talking intelligibly about it's qualitative experience is not possible. If the entity can understand what you mean when you say things like "I feel" and reply in similar terms, that is a good reason to assume its capacity for subjective experience.
(October 31, 2013 at 7:35 pm)bennyboy Wrote: 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. Basically, it's the story of Genesis, with the human mind as God.
And how is that relevant to the analogy?
