(This post grew out of an old conversation with Wei Dai.)
Imagine a person sitting in a room, communicating with the outside world through a terminal. Further imagine that the person knows some secret fact (e.g. that the Moon landings were a hoax), but is absolutely committed to never revealing their knowledge of it in any way.
Can you, by observing the input-output behavior of the system, distinguish it from a person who doesn't know the secret, or knows some other secret instead?
Clearly the only reasonable answer is "no, not in general".
Now imagine a person in the same situation, claiming to possess some mental skill that's hard for you to verify (e.g. visualizing four-dimensional objects in their mind's eye). Can you, by observing the input-output behavior, distinguish it from someone who is lying about having the skill, but has a good grasp of four-dimensional math otherwise?
Again, clearly, the only reasonable answer is "not in general".
Now imagine a sealed box that behaves exactly like a human, dutifully saying things like "I'm conscious", "I experience red" and so on. Moreover, you know from trustworthy sources that the box was built by scanning a human brain, and then optimizing the resulting program to use less CPU and memory (preserving the same input-output behavior). Would you be willing to trust that the box is in fact conscious, and has the same internal experiences as the human brain it was created from?
A philosopher believing in computationalism would emphatically say yes. But considering the examples above, I would say I'm not sure! Not at all!
But not much of an argument for using semantics grounded in (physical) reality. Doing so does not buy you maximum precision in absolute terms, and , what is worse, the alternative , of grounding terms for types of experience is 1st person experience, can give you more precision.
You may believe that, but do you know it?
The difference is that I accept the possibility that first person evidence could falsify 3rd person theory.
I'm not taking 1st person to mean 3rd person reports of (someone elses) 1st person experience.
What sort of precision are you talking about? More generally, you're repeatedly said that the concept of consciousness is very useful. I don't think I've seen that usefulness. I suspect that elaborating here is your best bet to convince me of anything. Although even if you did convince me of the usefulness of the term, that wouldn't help the "robot pain" problem much.
That's a slightly weird question. Is it somehow different from "why ... (read more)