Today's post, Against Modal Logics was originally published on 27 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Unfortunately, very little of philosophy is actually helpful in AI research, for a few reasons.
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Now, given an explanation for how subjective experience occurs, determine if a given physical entity has subjective experience. What would be different in your observations if I did not have subjective experiences?
Give me that explanation, and I'll tell you. It's clearly some kind of computational / information process, but it's not clear exactly what's going on there. It has a serve a survival purpose, or else we wouldn't have it. We'll probably be able to conduct experiments and find out down the line, but it's tough right now. I also suspect that subjective experience isn't a linear cutoff. It's probably a gradient of depth of insight that extends to organisms with simpler nervous systems and extends, at least in principle, past humans. But that's speculation on my part.