Define self aware? Lobsters are self aware, for some values of self aware. Self aware at its most basic just means that an organism shows awareness that its body is distinct from the rest of the universe: that there is a self and a non-self. That’s not very high level reasoning and lots of invertebrates manage it.
No. It’s just really crappy psuedoscientific anthropmorphising masquerading as science.
Wikipedia? Try again with something credible.
Nonsense, your computer can not plan or elaborate at all. It can do no more than carry out instructions that you have explicitely told it to carry out.
No, I don’t.,
Which is a particularly silly argument from ignorance. Where’s your evidence that the people who built the pyramids weren’t conscious, as you claimed?
:rolleyes:
When you have one of these zombies in a situation where we can all study it then come back to GD and we can discuss the facts. Until then your replies have no place in a forum for factual answers.
O’Connell, Caitlin (2007). The Elephant’s Secret Sense: The Hidden Lives of the Wild Herds of Africa. New York City: Simon & Schuster. pp. 174, 184.
Poole, Joyce (1996). Coming of Age with Elephants. Chicago, Illinois: Trafalgar Square. pp. 131–133, 143–144, 155–157.
Meredith, Martin (2004). Elephant Destiny: Biography of an Endangered Species in Africa. Canada: PublicAffairs. pp. 184–186.
How does it keep beating me at chess if it can’t plan? I’m not that bad!
Well, except I never claimed such a thing; I claimed that there is no reason that they would have had to be in order to build pyramids. Complexity of a behaviour generally does not imply consciousness of the agent undertaking the behaviour – again, look at computers playing chess, which is a pretty complex behaviour, I’m sure you’ll agree.
I have not claimed that these zombies exist, but that the concept exists and is a coherent one; because, if that’s true, the creators of the pyramids need not have been conscious.
So can you quote the authors’ credentials, and the sections where they actually mention seeing firsthand elephants covering up entire corpses?
This is a joke, right? Because if it’s not you really don;t now enough to be disputing this in GQ.
In case you really don’t know, computer chess programs work, in simplified terms, by selecting the highest probability move from massive tables of potential moves. There is absolutely not planning involved at all. The computer simply notes the position of all he pieces, cross references with table containing all the possible moves from all possible layouts and selects the one with the highest ranking.
But like I say, if you honestly don’t understand this very basic example of computer operation then really don’t know enough to be disputing this issue in GQ.
So your argument really *is *nothing but an argument from ignorance.
I have no idea what your point is here. The whole thing seems like an argument from ignorance. You have absolutely no evidence that the people who built the pyramids did so instinctively and unconsciously. Other example of such architecture was unambiguosly done by people who were conscious andwas not the result of instinct. But you want us to accept that the pyramid builders were unconscious while they built simply because we can’t prove to otherwise.
Nonsense.
The concept of spacemen also exists, and is also a coherent one. That doesn’t make von Daniken’s ridiculous claims that spacemen built the pyramids any less ridiculous.
The existence of a coherent concept does not make it valid to attribute anything to such a concept simply because you can’t prove it shouldn’t be. That’s just an argument from ignorance, and I would have hoped you would know that.
No, I can’t, and I wouldn’t go through the trouble if I could.
Look, this whole thing has really gone in silliness beyond all reasonable proportion. I will not respond to your petty attempts to discredit my reasoning via ad hominem attacks and misrepresentation of my arguments (knowingly, I must assume, since I have in the last post already pointed out to you that the argument you are attacking is not an argument I have ever made) in kind, because I think those are despicable tactics to use in a reasoned discussion. However, I will, for one last time, present my position, after which you are free to continue making a fool out of yourself.
What I am claiming is not that the builders of the pyramids were not conscious, despite your continued attacks on this strawman. What I am claiming is that their building of the pyramids is not sufficient to deduce that they were – that, in other words, every behaviour that can be algorithmically modelled need not be undertaken by a conscious agent, since it can equally well be accomplished by any universal Turing machine. Just like playing chess: it is not the case that a computer simply ‘looks up’ the best move in any possible position; because there are up to 10[sup]43[/sup] valid positions in chess, no currently possible computer could hold a database big enough to store them all (nor is it, in fact, currently possible to even compute all of these positions). It plans every bit as much as human players do: calculate a few ply into the game tree, and evaluate the resulting positions.
To argue that there, in fact, exist behaviours that are sufficient to decide the consciousness of the agent exhibiting them, as you seem to be doing, is to argue that the mind is capable of processes that can’t be modelled in an ordinary algorithmic way, and thus, constitutes something like a super-Turing machine, the existence of which is currently widely thought to be physically impossible. An act that requires consciousness is an act a universal Turing machine can’t possibly perform (else, you could have a computer perform it, which isn’t conscious, so the act can’t require consciousness), a sort of supertask not generally thought to be completable.
Shouldn’t you start a new thread in Great Debates for the new subject you’ve started?
Quoth Blake:
While it would be possible, in principle, to build a chess computer that way, to do so would require a computer far, far larger than the size of the entire observable Universe. It’s much easier to write a computer program that makes and carries out plans, and that is in fact how real chess computers work.
Your surfeit of imagination doesn’t make it true.
Sorry, but this isn’t correct, except for some simplified endgames (i.e., endgames with less than 6 pieces on the board-or maybe more since the last time I looked).
Hmmmm…