whpearson comments on Dennett's "Consciousness Explained": Prelude - Less Wrong

12 Post author: PhilGoetz 10 January 2010 07:31AM

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Comment author: ciphergoth 10 January 2010 11:01:00AM *  0 points [-]

There's one step in the book that I come back to over and over again, that I have so far never got a hard-problemer to directly address: the idea of heterophenomenology. If you follow this advice, then when you come to write your comment on what the problem of consciousness is, consider whether you have to directly and explicitly appeal to a shared experience of consciousness, or whether you can do it by referring to what we say about consciousness, which is observable from the outside.

Comment author: whpearson 10 January 2010 02:14:30PM *  0 points [-]

The trouble comes in when we start putting a utility on pleasure and pain. For example lets say you were given a programmatic description of a less than 100% faithful simulation of a human and asked to assess whether it would have (or reported it had) pain, without you running it.

Your answer would determine whether it was used in a world simulation.

Comment author: ciphergoth 10 January 2010 02:21:59PM 1 point [-]

Proposing a change in physics to make your utility function more intuitive seems like a serious mis-step to me.

Comment author: whpearson 10 January 2010 02:27:20PM *  1 point [-]

I'm just identifying the problem. I have no preferred solution at this point.

ETA: Altering physics is one possible solution. I'd wait on proposing a change to physics until we have a more concrete theory of intelligence and how human type systems are built. I think we can still push computers to be more like human-style systems. So I'm reserving judgement until we have those types of systems.