[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

[Eric Charles]

Glen said "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?"

To paraphrase Nick's answer:
Yes, of course we *can *build such a machine, so long as you agree to treat
"enjoy" and "think" and "feel" in the way that I do, and NOT as Chalmers or
the other dualists would. My approach does not contain a Chalmers-esque
hard problem.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>


On Fri, May 1, 2020 at 7:17 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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, 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.
>
>
>
> --
>
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
>
>
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