Hacker News Reader

Comment by wagwang | Hacker News Reader

> By ‘consciousness’ we mean phenomenal consciousness. One way of gesturing at this concept is to say that an entity has phenomenally conscious experiences if (and only if) there is ‘something it is like’ for the entity to be the subject of these experiences.

Stopped reading after this lol. Its just the turing test?

View on HN

No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

One of the primary issues with Nagel's approach is that "what is it like" is - for reasons I have never been able to fathom - a phrase that imports the very ambiguity that Nagel is attempting to dispel.

The question of what it would feel like to awake one day to find that - instead of lying in your bed - you are hanging upside down as a bat is nearly the complete dual of the Turing test. And even then, the Turing test only asks whether your interlocutor is convincing you that it can perform the particulars of human behavior.

The "what it's like" is often bound up with the additional "what would it be like to wake up as", which is a different (and possibly nonsensical) question. Leaving aside consciousness transfer, there's an assumption baked into most consciousness philosophy that all (healthy, normal) humans have an interior point of view, which we refer to as consciousness, or in this paper and review as "phenomenal consciousness". Sometimes people discuss qualia in reference to this. One thing that I've noticed more very recently is the rise of people claiming that they, themselves, do not experience this internal point of view, and that there's nothing that it is like to be them, or, put another way, humans claiming that they are p-zombies, or that everyone is. Not sure what to make of that.

Ok so its like a deep comparator on the sensory and processing units in the "mind".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com