Peterdjones comments on Proofs, Implications, and Models - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 October 2012 01:02PM

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Comment author: mwengler 01 November 2012 01:58:50PM 0 points [-]

virtual constructs mistake themselves for conscious

My brain just folded in on itself and vanished. Or at least in simulation it did. I think you may have stated a basilisk, or at least one that works on my self-simulation.

I used to think I was conscious, but then I realized I was mistaken.

Whoever it was that said "I err, therefore I am" didn't know what he was talking about... because he was wrong in thinking he was even conscious!

Comment author: Peterdjones 01 November 2012 02:21:07PM 0 points [-]

I used to think I was conscious, but then I realized I was mistaken.

Dennett actually believes somehting like that about phenomenal consciousness.

[Dennett:] These additions are perfectly real, but they are … not made of figment, but made of judgment. There is nothing more to phenomenology than that [Otto:] But there seems to be! [Dennett:] Exactly! There seems to be phenomenology. That's a fact that the heterophenomenologist enthusiastically concedes. But it does not follow from this undeniable, universally attested fact thatth ere really is phenomenology. This is the crux. (Dennett, 1991, p. 366)

Comment author: Ritalin 01 November 2012 06:23:13PM 0 points [-]

Er... can I get the cliff's notes on the jargon here?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 01 November 2012 04:23:00PM 0 points [-]

(nods) There's an amusing bit in a John Varley novel along these lines, where our hero asks a cutting-edge supercomputer AI whether it's genuinely conscious, and it replies something like "I've been exploring that question for a long time, and I'm still not certain. My current working theory is that no, I'm not -- nor are you, incidentally -- but I am not yet confident of that." Our hero thinks about that answer for a while and then takes a nap, IIRC.