What, linking to Conscious Entities again? ...

[alexr_rwx]

Probably the best blog in the whole world, Conscious Entities, has now switched to WordPress, meaning now Peter (the CE dude) now has a feed, meaning...

consc_entities. Which you should friend. Probably right now. Go on, I'll wait.

His description of the site:

What is consciousness, and how does it work? Is the problem of qualia the real 'hard problem', or is that the mystery of intentionality? Is 'strong AI' a mirage, or should we surrender ourselves to the robots? Have we actually got any selves to worry about, or is selfhood illusory - and is consciousness itself just another illusion? These are the issues argued over and (I hope) clarified in these pages.

(also: fairly similar conversations happen in comic book form over at Halo and Sprocket, which is about a young lady, an angel, and a robot)

Comments

Still not sure I get it.

[lindseykuper]

If there was a Dumb Non-Experiencing Robot in the frame, and it had some sort of vision system going, presumably it would be able to find the pole, right?

I don't know! You don't know! Daniel Dennett doesn't know! It's the xkcd Universe, man! Anything can happen!

But, assuming it could find the pole: so what? Would that mean that experiencing-the-pole isn't a quale? Can qualia only be experienced by conscious entities? Is that the definition of qualia? Is that the definition of consciousness?

Is a quale something you can't describe in terms of something else?

Re: Still not sure I get it.

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

There's the distinction between functionally finding-the-pole and having the *experience* of looking at the pole.

Maybe! Or maybe information-processing is the same as conscious experience, like Chalmers throws out there!

(for some people, probably me included, consciousness is the ability to be having a first-person, qualia-filled experience...)

And it's true, nobody knows, even Daniel Dennett!