(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!
Your solution is unconvincing because it can be fulfilled by code that is too simple to be to be convincing. If you change the definition of pain to remove the the subjective, felt aspect, then the resulting problem is easy to solve...but it's not the original problem. It's not that I can't understand you, it's that it's hard to believe anyone could pull such a fraudulent manoeuvre.
Meaninglessness is not the default. Other member's of your language community are willing to discuss things like robot pain. Does that bother you?
If definitions do not prove statements , you have no proof that robot pain is easy.
If you redefine pain, you are not making statements about pain in my language. Your schmain might be a trivially easy thing to understand, but it's not what I asked about.
What the hell? I'm not just annoyed because of how accusatory this sounds, I'm annoyed because it apparently took you a week of talking about alternative definitions to realize that I am, at times, talking about alternative definitions. Are you not paying attention at all?
Well, it should be. I will consider all statements meaningless unless I can argue otherwise (or I don't really care about the topic). Obviously, you can do whatever you want, but I need you to explain to me, how it makes sense ... (read more)