| I don’t think I follow you. > So I shall collect for you all the things we have been talking about when we have said "this is conscious!". And you do the same. And my claim is that everything in this group is in this group... because ... it has a nervous system. That would be great if we were in 1930 and asking which pre-existing creatures are conscious, but you are asserting that no members of a group which was created to implement all the forms of intelligence that have yet been made quantifiable (as opposed to qualitative judgements of intelligence) are in your set. I assert that you have a list, and that you have merely defined your words to be a shorthand for that list, rather than made a hypothesis that those words are descriptive properties that allow us to even ask if other things can be in that list, nor to ask if all members of that list truly belong there. (I.e. “is a dog intelligent?”) For example, you now assert the list is synonymous with “nervous system” (previously “conscious”, previously “intelligent”) without explaining why a digital- or semiconductor-based nervous system would fail your test. > To believe that an electrified piece of metal could ever belong in the group of things united by their common feature "consciousness" is profound bizarre to me: what exactly is that thing meant to possess that I have? That’s my question, too. What is that thing which you are meant to posess which supposedly cannot exist on artificial substrates? Why is a biological neuron fundamentally better at thinking than a computer simulation of a biological neuron? Still, I’m not sure I actually follow what you’re trying to say, because your last three paragraphs seem to be distorted by either autocomplete or google translate. Either way I just cannot extract your point from them. |