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ChristianKl comments on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 - Less Wrong Discussion
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All this talk of P-zombies. Is there even a hint of a mechanism that anybody can think of to detect if something else is conscious, or to measure their degree of consciousness assuming it admits of degree?
I have spent my life figuring other humans are probably conscious purely on an Occam's razor kind of argument that I am conscious and the most straightforward explanation for my similarities and grouping with all these other people is that they are in relevant respects just like me. But I have always thought that increasingly complex simulations of humans could be both "obviously" not conscious but be mistaken by others as conscious. Does every human on the planet who reaches "voice mail jail," voice text interactive systems, are they all aware that they have not reached a consciousness? Do even those of us who are aware forget sometimes when we are not being careful? Is this going to become even a harder distinction to make as tech continues to get better?
I have been enjoying the television show "almost human." In this show there are androids, most of which have been designed to NOT be too much like humans, although what they are really like is boring rule-following humans. It is clear in this show that the value on an android "life" is a tiny fraction of the value on a "human" life, in the first episode a human cop kills his android partner in order to get another one. The partner he does get is much more like a human, but still considered the property of the police department for which he works, and nobody really has much of a problem with this. Ironically, this "almost human" android partner is African American.
It depends on whether you subscribe to materialism. If you do then there nothing to measure. Conscious might even be a tricky illusion as Dennett suggests.
If on the other hand you do believe that there something beyond materialism there are plenty of frameworks to choose from that provide ideas about what one could measure.
OMG then someone should get busy! Tell me what I can measure and if it makes any kind of sense I will start working on it!
I do have a qualia for perceiving whether someone else is present in a meditation or is absent minded. It could be that it's some mental reactions that picks up microgestures or some other thing that I don't consciously perceive and summarizes that information into a qualia for mental presence.
Investigating how such a qualia works is what I would do personally when I would want to investigate consciousness.
But you probably have no such qualia, so you either need someone who has or develop it yourself. In both cases that probably means seeking a good meditation teacher.
It's a difficult subject to talk about in a medium like this where people who are into a spiritual framework that has some model of what conscious happens to be have phenomenological primitives that the audience I'm addressing doesn't have. In my experience most of the people who I consider capable in that regard are very unwilling to talk about details with people who don't have phenomenological primitives to make sense of them. Instead of answering a question directly a Zen teacher might give you a koan and tell you to come back in a month when you build the phenomenological primitives to understand it, expect that he doesn't tell you about phenomenological primitives.