Re: Sentience

From: Eliezer Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Jun 02 2004 - 09:12:28 MDT


Ben Goertzel wrote:
>
>>A *philosophy* of mind? Of what conceivable use is a
>>*philosophy* of mind?
>
> To guide thinking about the mind, in those aspects where science does
> not yet give useful guidance.
>
> Where empirical evidence is too badly insufficient, we have to rely to
> an extent on intuition, and philosophy is basically (collectively and/or
> individually) systematized intuition.

It looks to me like in this case one is just screwed, as the Greek
philosophers were screwed. They relied on systematized intuition and went
systematically awry, without ever coming close to the correct answers.
Philosophy is not enough to carry the weight. Why codify one's errors?
Better to leave the slate blank.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence


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