From: Stuart Armstrong (dragondreaming@googlemail.com)
Date: Fri Mar 06 2009 - 03:12:17 MST
> Anyone who believes that consciousness (that which makes you not a P-zombie) exists believes that there are some things which are not conscious. I can always construct a continuum between these cases. For example, if a newly fertilized egg is not conscious, what about a 3 month old embryo? If an ant is not conscious, what about a dog? If a program that prints "I think, therefore I am" is not conscious, what about a program that also passes the Turing test? By a process of binary search, I can always force you to draw the line through some absurdly small region.
>
> The only other alternatives are to claim that either everything is conscious or that nothing is conscious. In either case, the term is meaningless.
>
> And I can do the same for questions about identity.
Consciousness need not be a binary quantity. Same goes for identity.
And consciousness need not have anything to do with zombies - I
believe that consciousness exists, and that Zombies are impossible.
Stuart
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