On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

I not only know of ANNs, I've done some programming with them myself. ANNs are interesting in that they can allow a system to adapt to its environment via "punishment" and "reward," and I think it's very likely that even a simple algorithm will be able to lead to Turing-passing machines, via brute force, in our lifetimes, especially if people on the internet can be drawn into providing feedback "punishment" and "reward." (for example by having a couple hundred million people rate iterations of a computer-generated song)

However, they say very little about the philosophical reality of subjective minds-- specifically, why there are subjective minds rather than an absence of them.

Are there?

I couldn't help myself. I have to ask, if you're certain that we'll see brute forced turing-passing machines in our lifetime, how will you overcome the problem of other minds (or do you not see that as a problem)? I think that a machine like that would have a hell of alot to say about "mind". We'd be coming face to face with a system that turns "possible theoretical interpretations" into cold hard reality. A turing passing system would give us no reason to doubt it's "mind" unless we were willing to doubt the minds of others - and possibly even ourselves.

The short answer is, I don't know. I can imagine the possibility of whole social revolutions going on-- android rights, etc., and the universe's big joke on us would be that we've programmed them to stimulate emotional responses in ourselves, and then responded emotionally, perhaps at great inconvenience to ourselves-- all the while without the androids actually being able to experience anything.

But if I couldn't tell the difference between a real human and a borg, then I would indeed have a serious philosophical issue: I'd have to reexamine my criteria for being willing to accept that another physical entity is in fact a thinking being.