I do find qualia pretty mysterious. But I don't see any reason that an artificial machine couldn't have them as well as a human; you don't even really need to be an extreme materialist to see that. If humans are projections of consciousness then why can't a humanlike machine be too? Their origins just involve a different physical process, that involved humans in a different way... Searle in a sense is more materialist than the strong-AI advocates, since he insists that the presence of qualia has something specific to do with the fact that it's a biological brain and not something else. Indeed, if I recall correctly he criticizes strong-AI software-ism as a type of dualism (though that might have been somebody else).
But I am also somewhat skeptical of the strong-AI people on practical grounds. I have no philosophical objections to the idea that a human could be emulated by a program running on a conventional computer, and if it worked I'd accept such a system as a conscious being; but in practice the performance of such a system would likely be so poor that it would never get any thinking done. So I tend to think that if somebody ever makes intelligent machines they will be special-purpose mechanisms that more closely resemble physical brains (not necessarily in terms of substance, but in terms of logical functioning) rather than generic function evaluators that got fed the right function.
I'm repelled by any metaphysics that allows the existence of "zombies" (beings that act exactly like people but have no qualia), so I like the idea that there is no individual soul that could be added in or taken away without observable consequences, but that the universe is simply so constructed that some kinds of events (maybe even all events!) necessarily have qualia associated with them, that the events that involve acting like a person are among those, and that our brains' ability to accumulate memory means that some of these qualia include the illusion of a unified self. Based on my very limited knowledge, this seems to be more or less what Gautama Buddha is said to have thought about the subject, though his elaborations on how this incorporates the traditional Hindu concepts of reincarnation and karma (especially the latter) seem like patch-up jobs to me. Very likely there are subtleties I am missing.
Unlike Spivack, I'm OK with defining science as limited to observations that can be replicated and shared. (Some of those could include reports of subjective experiences, which after all is really all anyone is ever doing, though I think we do have to accept that any differences in the experiences themselves that are not present in the reports are beyond the ability of science to study). I think part of the problem is that people see "non-scientific" as a pejorative, when it doesn't have to be. It's only a pejorative when used to describe something purported to be science.
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Lots of italicized words
Date: 2005-06-09 06:33 am (UTC)But I am also somewhat skeptical of the strong-AI people on practical grounds. I have no philosophical objections to the idea that a human could be emulated by a program running on a conventional computer, and if it worked I'd accept such a system as a conscious being; but in practice the performance of such a system would likely be so poor that it would never get any thinking done. So I tend to think that if somebody ever makes intelligent machines they will be special-purpose mechanisms that more closely resemble physical brains (not necessarily in terms of substance, but in terms of logical functioning) rather than generic function evaluators that got fed the right function.
I'm repelled by any metaphysics that allows the existence of "zombies" (beings that act exactly like people but have no qualia), so I like the idea that there is no individual soul that could be added in or taken away without observable consequences, but that the universe is simply so constructed that some kinds of events (maybe even all events!) necessarily have qualia associated with them, that the events that involve acting like a person are among those, and that our brains' ability to accumulate memory means that some of these qualia include the illusion of a unified self. Based on my very limited knowledge, this seems to be more or less what Gautama Buddha is said to have thought about the subject, though his elaborations on how this incorporates the traditional Hindu concepts of reincarnation and karma (especially the latter) seem like patch-up jobs to me. Very likely there are subtleties I am missing.
Unlike Spivack, I'm OK with defining science as limited to observations that can be replicated and shared. (Some of those could include reports of subjective experiences, which after all is really all anyone is ever doing, though I think we do have to accept that any differences in the experiences themselves that are not present in the reports are beyond the ability of science to study). I think part of the problem is that people see "non-scientific" as a pejorative, when it doesn't have to be. It's only a pejorative when used to describe something purported to be science.