Are you abndoning the position that "robot in pain" is meanngless in all cases?
I never said "all cases", that would be ridiculous, the problems with "robot pain" depends on how the words are defined. With a strict physical definition the problem is easy, with a weaker physical definition, we have the usual classification problem, and with your definition the phrase is meaningless.
They aren't , but that is not sufficient t show that you can prove things buy redefining words.
I don't think I've ever tried to prove anything by redefining any words. There is some sort of miscommunication going on here. What I may do is try to convince you that my definitions are better, while matching common usage.
Who are you communicating to when you use your own definitions?
You're asking this as though I maliciously misinterpreted what you mean by consciousness. Is that how you see this? What I tried to do is understand your definition to the best of my ability, and point out the problems in those. When talking about other definitions, I explicitly said things like "In this view pain is ..." or "If you defined consciousness as ...". Was it actually unclear which definition I was talking about where, for all this time?
. With a strict physical definition the problem is easy,
Solve it , then.
with your definition the phrase is meaningless.
Prove that.
I don't think I've ever tried to prove anything by redefining any words [..] my definitions are better,
But using them proves nothing?
Who are you communicating to when you use your own definitions?
You're asking this as though I maliciously misinterpreted what you mean by consciousness.
I am wondering who you communicate with when you use a private language>
(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!