Comment on Three consistent positions for computationalists

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:05:09 GMT

I decided to look back to see how I got into this fruitless conversation. I think it started with this question from dfranke:

Are you able to make any sense of the concept of "computing red"?

I responded flippantly that I was unable to make any sense of the concept of experiencing red. I didn't make clear that what I was really objecting to was the reification of "red". I certainly can imagine any person with the same kindergarten education as myself, recognizing a red apple, or a red light, or a red object of indeterminate shape. I can imagine someone classifying the sensation of a tack in the bottom as painful, and someone identifying the taste of lemon juice as sour.

I also have no trouble at all imagining that a robot trained by a naive Bayes classifier (rather than by a kindergarden teacher named Mrs. Weiskopf), could easily recognize those red things as 'red', the piercing thing as 'painful', and the lemon thing as 'sour'. Yet people keep suggesting that robots can't have qualia.

So, I respectfully suggest that your examples are not successfully communicating to me what it is about qualia that you know you have, you suspect that I have, and you (or maybe it is just dfranke) claim a robot cannot have.

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