Re: [Wittrs] Wittgenstein on Machines and Thinking
- From: Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:38:12 -0700 (PDT)
Stuart writes: "It looks like a perfectly legitimate position to me to claim
that a machine can be conscious if consciousness is just so many functions
being performed by certain kinds of processes which can be matched by a
machine."
Yes, Stuart. It is perfectly legitimate for you to imagine something that does
process-list X, and to say of it, it is "conscious" in the sense of doing
process-list X. The point being: you've only communicated to us that
process-list X is imagined to be happening, and you've named it "conscious."
The real question is what to do of people who deny the prop. They will either:
(a) deny that process-list X will ever happen (be built); or (b) deny that its
presence should be named "conscious" in their way of speaking (or deny that the
imagined thing is a "machine"). If, when asserting (b), they offer a sense
understandable in the language game, one is left with the ultimate conclusion:
that your imagined creature is only "conscious" in a SENSE of speaking,
assuming that sense is still viable in the language marketplace at the time the
thing is built, if any. (Who knows -- we may have an entirely new grammar for
it).
Regards and thanks.
Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
[spoiler]Assistant Professor
Wright State University
Personal Website: http://seanwilson.org
SSRN papers: http://tinyurl.com/3eatnrx
Wittgenstein
Discussion: http://seanwilson.org/wiki/doku.php?id=wittrs [/spoiler]
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