Um, no. What it IS is a radically different meaning of the word than what the p-zombie nonsense uses. Chalmers’ view requires stripping ‘consciousness’ of any consequence, while Eliezer’s involves leaving the standard usage intact.
‘Consciousness’ in that sense refers to self-awareness or self-modeling, the attempt of a complex computational system to represent some aspects of itself, in itself. It has causal implications for the behavior of the system, can potentially be detected by an outside observer who has access to the mechanisms underlying that system, and is fully part of reality.
What Eliezer wrote is consistent with that definition of consciousness. But that is not “the standard usage”. It’s a useless usage. Self-representation is trivial and of no philosophical interest. The interesting philosophical question is why I have what the 99% of the world who doesn’t use your “standard usage” means by “consciousness”. Why do I have self-awareness? - and by self-awareness, I don’t mean anything I can currently describe computationally, or know how to detect the consequences of.
This is the key unsolved mystery of the universe, the only one that we have really no insight into yet. You can’t call it “nonsense” when it clearly exists and clearly has no explanation or model. Unless you are a zombie, in which case what I interpret as your stance is reasonable.
There is a time to be a behaviorist, and it may be reasonable to say that we shouldn’t waste our time pursuing arguments about internal states that we can’t detect behaviorially, but it is Silly to claim to have dispelled the mystery merely by defining it away.
There have been too many attempts by scientists to make claims about consciousness that sound astonishing, but turn out to be merely redefinitions of “consciousness” to something trivial. Like this, for instance. Or Crick’s “The Astonishing Hypothesis”, or other works by neuroscientists on “consciousness” when they are actually talking about focus of attention. I have developed an intellectual allergy to such things. Going on about zombies and consciousness as if you were addressing philosophical issues, when you have redefined consciousness to mean a particular easily-comprehended computational or graph-theoretic property, falls squarely into the category of ideas that I consider Silly.
Caledonian writes:
‘Consciousness’ in that sense refers to self-awareness or self-modeling, the attempt of a complex computational system to represent some aspects of itself, in itself. It has causal implications for the behavior of the system, can potentially be detected by an outside observer who has access to the mechanisms underlying that system, and is fully part of reality. What Eliezer wrote is consistent with that definition of consciousness. But that is not “the standard usage”. It’s a useless usage. Self-representation is trivial and of no philosophical interest. The interesting philosophical question is why I have what the 99% of the world who doesn’t use your “standard usage” means by “consciousness”. Why do I have self-awareness? - and by self-awareness, I don’t mean anything I can currently describe computationally, or know how to detect the consequences of.
This is the key unsolved mystery of the universe, the only one that we have really no insight into yet. You can’t call it “nonsense” when it clearly exists and clearly has no explanation or model. Unless you are a zombie, in which case what I interpret as your stance is reasonable.
There is a time to be a behaviorist, and it may be reasonable to say that we shouldn’t waste our time pursuing arguments about internal states that we can’t detect behaviorially, but it is Silly to claim to have dispelled the mystery merely by defining it away.
There have been too many attempts by scientists to make claims about consciousness that sound astonishing, but turn out to be merely redefinitions of “consciousness” to something trivial. Like this, for instance. Or Crick’s “The Astonishing Hypothesis”, or other works by neuroscientists on “consciousness” when they are actually talking about focus of attention. I have developed an intellectual allergy to such things. Going on about zombies and consciousness as if you were addressing philosophical issues, when you have redefined consciousness to mean a particular easily-comprehended computational or graph-theoretic property, falls squarely into the category of ideas that I consider Silly.