DAVIS@EMBL.BITNET.UUCP (02/02/87)
It seems like its time on the AIList to cut around some of the
interesting but bottomless waffle that has come to fill this useful organ.
I fear that Stevan Harnad's most important point is being lost in his
endless efforts to deal with a shower of light and insubstantial blows.
At the same time, his own language and approach to the problem is
obscuring some of the issues he himself raises.
I cannot help but notice that the debates on conciousness that
we're seeing resemble the debating of the Data General engineers in
Tracy Kidder's book "The Soul of a New Machine". Its time to wake up
folks - we're not building a new Eclipse, with some giant semiconductor
supplying the new 60880 'concious' chip, and the only real task left
being the arranging of the goodies to make use of its wondrous capacities.
No, its time to wake up to the mystery of the C-1: How can ANYTHING *know*
ANYTHING at all ? We are not concerned with how we shuffle the use of
memory, illusion, perceptual inputs etc., so as to maximise efficiency and
speed - we are concerned with the most fundamental problem of all - how
can we know ? Too many contributors seem to me to be concerned with the
secondary extension of this question to a specific version of the general
one "how can we know about X ?". It may be important for AI programmers
to deal with ways of shuffling the data and the processing order so that
a system gets access to X for further data manipulation, but this has
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the primary question of how it is possible
to know anything.....
The glimpses of Dennet & Hofstadter's wise approach that we've seen
are encouraging, but still we see Harnad struggling with why's and not how's.
Being a molecular biologist by trade if not religion, I would like to
temporarily assert that conciousness is a *biological* phenomenon, and,
taking Harnad's bull by its horns once again, to assert further that because
this is so, the question of *why* conciousnes