Did you mean "consciousness"?
Heh. That's fair.
We are reasoning about consciousness in general, and experience in general. That's not at all the same as comparing the taste of today's coffee to yesterdays.
If having experiences is an important part of consciousness, then I'd expect you to reason about them, what induces them, their components, their similarities and differences. This "consciousness in general" phrasing is extremely weird.
Starting there means discarding any other kind of prima-facie evidence.
I didn't start here, I wasn't born yesterday and fully formed, I started from the same magical assumptions that everyone starts with, and eventually I found them unnecessary and unattractive. Unless you meant something else by "start".
started from the same magical assumptions that everyone starts with, and eventually I found them unnecessary and unattractive.
There's that word again.
(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!