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"On the contrary, most people don't care whether it is conscious in some deep philosophical sense."

Do you mean that people don't care if they are philosophical zombies or not? I think they care very much. I also think that you're eliding the point a bit by using "deep" as a way to hand wave the problem away. The problem of consciousness is not some arcane issue that only matters to philosophers in their ivory towers. It is difficult. It is unsolved. And... and this is important. it is a very large problem, so large that we should not spend decades exploring false leads. I believe strong AI proponents have wasted 40 years... (read 547 more words →)

"Is this a variant of what it is like to be a bat?"

Is there something that it is like to be you? There are also decent arguments that qualia does matter. It is hardly a settled matter. If anything, the philosophical consensus is that qualia is important.

"Whether some AI has qualia or not doesn't change any of the external behavior,"

Yes, behaviorism is a very attractive solution. But presumably what people want is a living conscious artificial mind and not a useful house maid in robot form. I can get that functionality right now.

If I write a program that allows my PC to speak in perfect English and in a perfectly human... (read more)

That is correct, you don't know what semantic content is.

"I still don't know what makes you so sure conciousness is impossible on an emulator."

For the same reason that I know simulated fire will not burn anything. In order for us to create an artificial mind, which certainly must be possible, we must duplicate the causal relations that exist in real consciousnesses.

Let us imagine that you go to your doctor and he says, "You're heart is shot. We need to replace it. Lucky for you we have miniature super computer we can stick into your chest that can simulate the pumping action of a real heart down to the atomic level. Every atom,... (read more)

"Because the telegraph analogy is actually a pretty decent analogy."

No it isn't. Constructing analogies is for poets and fiction writers. Science does not construct analogies. The force on an accelerating mass isn't analogous to F=ma, it IS F=ma. If what you said is true, that neurons are like telegraph stations and their dendrites the wires then it could not be true that neurons can communicate without a direct connection or "wire" between them. Neurons can communicate without any synaptic connection between them (See: "Neurons Talk Without Synapses"). Therefore the analogy is false.

"What makes you think a sufficiently large number of organized telegraph lines won't act like a brain?"

Because that is an example... (read more)

"What do you mean by "strong AI is refuted""

The strong AI hypothesis is that consciousness is the software running on the hardware of the brain. Therefore one does not need to know or understand how brains actually work to construct a living conscious mind. Thus any system that implements the right computer program with the right inputs and outputs has cognition in exactly the same literal sense that human beings have understanding, thought and memory. It was the belief of strong AI proponents such as Marvin Minski at MIT and others that they were literally creating minds when writing their programs. They felt no need to stoop so low as to poke... (read more)

Parallelism changes absolutely nothing other than speed of execution.

Strong AI is refuted because syntax is insufficient for semantics. Allowing the syntax to execute in parallel will not alter this because the refutation of strong AI attacks the logical basis for the strong AI hypothesis itself. If you are trying to build a television with tinker-toys it does not improve your chances to substitute higher quality tinker-toys for the older wooden ones. You will still never get a functional TV.

They do not actually have a physical non-von Neumann architecture. They are simulating a brain on simulated neurosynaptic cores on a simulated non-von Neumann architecture on a Blue Gene/Q super computer which consists of... (read more)

"It'd be hard for me to overstate my skepticism for the genre of popular political science books charging that their authors' enemies are innately evil. I haven't read Mooney's book"

It is obvious you have not read it because he makes no such claim nor have I. In fact he ends the book with a new found respect for conservatives. Loyalty, personal responsibility, being willing to set aside one's own desires for the good of the group are all admirable qualities. I myself do not despise conservatives in themselves. I do despise the hucksters and grifters who promote pseudoscience and conspiracy theories in order to enrich themselves. Those people find a significant percentage... (read more)