[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Fri May 1 19:16:37 EDT 2020

Absolutely.  If strong AI people are in the "quacks like a duck" school, than I am a strong AI person. 

Devil’s advocate: So a robot could be made that would feel pain?

Well, you are cheating a bit, because you are asking me to participate in a word game I have already disavowed, the game in which pain is something inside my brain that I use my pain-feelers to palpate (see also Natsoulas, this volume). To me, pain is an emergency organization of my behavior in which I deploy physical and social defenses of various sorts. You show me a robot that is part of a society of robots, becomes frantic when you break some part of it, calls upon its fellow robots to assist, etc., I will be happy to admit that it is “paining.”

Devil’s advocate: On your account, nonsocial animals don’t feel pain?

Well, not the same sort of pain. Any creature that struggles when you do something to it is “paining” in some sense. But animals that have the potential to summon help seem to pain in a different way.

I apologize for constantly citing that paper.  But how could I possibly know what I believe if I don’t know what I have written.  

By the way, back before Methuselah, there was a lovely psychological literature demystifying hypnosis. The basic set up was you have a bunch of “judges” on one side of a one-way glass window and subjects on the other side.  Two conditions: the subjects are hypnotized to do all the things they do OR the subjects are simply asked to do those things.  Judges could not distinguish the two kinds of subjects.  

Nick 

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Friday, May 1, 2020 3:56 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Excellent! Now we're getting somewhere. So the problem of qualia and, say, whether or not we could build a machine that *enjoys* playing the piano, you fall in the camp of the strong-AI people. We can definitely build a machine that thinks and feels just like a human. Is that right?

(Full disclosure: I'm a strong-AI person. But I'm also pretty practical in my understanding of AI and the achievement of it exists far beyond at least one inflection point. And we'll probably all go extinct before it happens.)

On 5/1/20 2:50 PM,  <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:

> Perhaps I misspoke.  I certainly agree that working out an entity's point of view is a problem.  I just don't see why it's a hard problem.  In otherwords, when Chalmers asserts that there is a Hard Problem of consciousness, him implies that he is pointing to some problem unique in its hardness.  I think I am only denying there is not such uniquely hard problem, not that there is not a problem of working out what is from different points of view or a problem of working out some entity's point of view from what is.  

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