Another illuminating exchange adapted from the
Moot --
a religious belief that a mind can only exist in the form of a biological brain... implies something magical about brains
One
can easily concede the possibility in principle that phenomena legible
as "minds" might be instantiated on non-biological structures while at
once taking seriously that all consciousness properly so called has
always been biological, that our understanding of consciousness and
intelligence as phenomena is conspicuously incomplete, and that
believers in the program of building artificial intelligence as a cohort
often exhibit overconfidence incompatible with their history of
failure, rely on reductive understandings of mind that have gotten them
nowhere for good reason, regularly exhibit pathological hostility to the
biological incarnation of mind and sociopathic hostility to the social
performance of intelligence. You can dismiss those who don't ascribe to
the faith-based initiative of good old fashioned artificial intelligence
and its digital-utopian, cybernetic totalist, singularitarian and
techno-immortal variations as religionists if you like, if that helps
you sleep at night, but it isn't exactly hard to discern the religiosity
of GOFAI ideology.
you would not be able to tell assuming the machine accurately copies the person's behaviour in every way
Consciousness
and intelligence have subjective, objective, and inter-subjective
dimensions in which they are substantiated -- when you claim your ideal
machine "copies the person's behavior in every way" you must be presuming
the machine is physically indistinguishable from the person and would be
so even for a physician or a lover; you must also be proposing that the narrative
continuity of this person would be subjectively and objectively coherent
-- for instance, nobody would have witnessed the death and replacement
of the person by a machine. Quite apart from the fact that none of this
remotely accomplishable and so there is no reason to regard any of this
as relevant to pubic policy or investment or as anything but a
distraction from actually urgently relevant questions and problems (some
of them related to computation and networks), to be honest your thought
experiment seems to rely on a premise of indistinguishability which
either disregards as irrelevant differences that actually make a
difference to anybody who isn't a sociopath or which sets such a high
bar for indistinguishability that it isn't clear why it wouldn't be
pathological to claim the person in question had been "replaced" by a
"machine" in the first place.
4 comments:
You, you, you bioconservative, you!
Hey, you laugh, but I really do think one of the impacts of the transhumanist/superlative-futurological derangement of technoscience deliberation is the way every position gets skewed to technophilic/technophobic poles neither of which is of much use for understanding or policy-making and both of which are politically reactionary.
Folks who say "religious belief" to attack an idea annoy me. It's something of a bugbear.
And hearing it from the robocultically-inclined always strikes me as an especially hilarious turn.
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