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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DonT" data-source="post: 7155898" data-attributes="member: 6804178">While I think that it is possible that I am wrong in thinking that anyone else is conscious, I don't think that it it is possible for me to be wrong in thinking that I am conscious because I am immediately aware of it.  I don't even know what it would mean to be wrong about something like that.  It seems to me that I am looking at a screen.  If you tell me that I'm wrong, I will grant the possibility that there is no screen there.  But if you say, "No, that's not what I meant; I meant that it doesn't even SEEM to you that you are looking at a screen," then I have no idea what that claim is supposed to mean.I don't think that you and I are simply following algorithims. I think that do we have free will and that following algorithims could never get you to free will, and I don't think that simply following algorithims could ever get you to consciousness, either.  We agreed earlier that a calculator doesn't know what a square root IS.  I don't see how algorithms ever get you beyond a more powerful and very fast calculator.  I don't have a theory of consciousness, but it seems to me that consciousness requires that we have at least some notion of the contents of our concepts, knowing not just the chemical composition of salt, but things such as what salt tastes like, and I don't see how a computer could ever know the meaning of the terms it was manipulating.Since I am sceptical of the possibilty of conscious androids, I would first have to be convinced that this scepticism was unwarranted and then I would need a positive argument that a particular android was conscious.  Without the first, I have no idea what form the second would take.  But if I were convinced that a particular android were conscious, then, while I grant that it would be more different from us than a Wookie is, I don't see why those differences would preclude a right to self-determination.What is it about treating non-humans as though they were humans that has you worried?</blockquote>

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