The title is a play on “Against the Airport and its World” and is in no way intended as a slight against any named author, both of whom I respect intellectually, and do not know enough about interpersonally to evaluate as people. There was a grammatical error in the title previously that is still reflected in the Subreddit link. The copyeditor has been executed and his line extirpated.
You keep treating possibilities as actualities. LamDa might be simulating people without being programmed or prompted to, the CR might have full semantics without a single symbol being grounded ..but they might not.
There isn't any fundamental.doubt about what computers are doing, because they are computers. Computers can't have strongly emergent properties. You can peek inside the box and see what's going on.
The weakness of the systems reply to the CR is that it forces you to accept that a system that is nothing but a look up table has consciousness.. or that a system without a single grounded symbol has semantics. (Searle can close the loophole about encoding images by stipulation).
Likewise, there is no reason to suppose that LamDa is simulating a person every time it answers a request -- it's not designed to do that, and it's not going to do so inexplicably because it's a computer, and you can examine what it's doing.
To me, the essence of consciousness is its experiential aspect, what you call its qualia. You say that a P-zombie would still be worthy of ethical consideration--why? If it has no experience whatsoever, then it cannot feel pain or suffering, have hopes and dreams, etc. Without those capabilities, we need not consider it in our ethical considerations. If I truly knew that a "person" I was talking to was a P-zombie, on what grounds would it be wrong for me to cut off its arm or even destroy it? In what meaningful sense is this any different from, say, destroying a Furby?
Given my premise that consciousness requires experience/awareness/qualia, to answer that "the room itself" is conscious requires a further assumption--that some form of panpsychism is possible. You have to believe that consciousness/awareness can inhere or be correlated with complex systems that are not brain-bound. This leads us into philosophical territory that many people are not willing to enter. It would seem to indicate that any complex system is in some way conscious. See, for example, the argument that if the kind of functionalist/materialist theory of mind you are here proposing is true, then the United States is "conscious": http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140721.pdf. I am willing to go here, but that is because I am not a materialist, so I am perfectly happy with a view of the world that sees consciousness/spirit inhering in some mysterious way in all things. I somewhat doubt that this is as comfortable a position for materialists/functionalists like yourself.
You keep treating possibilities as actualities. LamDa might be simulating people without being programmed or prompted to, the CR might have full semantics without a single symbol being grounded ..but they might not.
There isn't any fundamental.doubt about what computers are doing, because they are computers. Computers can't have strongly emergent properties. You can peek inside the box and see what's going on.
The weakness of the systems reply to the CR is that it forces you to accept that a system that is nothing but a look up table has consciousness.. or that a system without a single grounded symbol has semantics. (Searle can close the loophole about encoding images by stipulation).
Likewise, there is no reason to suppose that LamDa is simulating a person every time it answers a request -- it's not designed to do that, and it's not going to do so inexplicably because it's a computer, and you can examine what it's doing.
To me, the essence of consciousness is its experiential aspect, what you call its qualia. You say that a P-zombie would still be worthy of ethical consideration--why? If it has no experience whatsoever, then it cannot feel pain or suffering, have hopes and dreams, etc. Without those capabilities, we need not consider it in our ethical considerations. If I truly knew that a "person" I was talking to was a P-zombie, on what grounds would it be wrong for me to cut off its arm or even destroy it? In what meaningful sense is this any different from, say, destroying a Furby?
Given my premise that consciousness requires experience/awareness/qualia, to answer that "the room itself" is conscious requires a further assumption--that some form of panpsychism is possible. You have to believe that consciousness/awareness can inhere or be correlated with complex systems that are not brain-bound. This leads us into philosophical territory that many people are not willing to enter. It would seem to indicate that any complex system is in some way conscious. See, for example, the argument that if the kind of functionalist/materialist theory of mind you are here proposing is true, then the United States is "conscious": http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140721.pdf. I am willing to go here, but that is because I am not a materialist, so I am perfectly happy with a view of the world that sees consciousness/spirit inhering in some mysterious way in all things. I somewhat doubt that this is as comfortable a position for materialists/functionalists like yourself.