Word: dennetts
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...Dennett's book got rave reviews and has sold well, 100,000 copies to date. But among philosophers the reaction was mixed. The can-do attitude that was common in the decades after Ryle wrote--the belief that consciousness is readily "explained"--has waned. "Most people in the field now take the problem far more seriously," says Rutgers University philosopher Colin McGinn, author of The Problem of Consciousness. By acting as if consciousness is no great mystery, says McGinn, "Dennett's fighting a rearguard action...
...Mysterians are fundamentally scientific in outlook. They don't begin by doubting the audacious premises of AI. O.K., they say, maybe it is possible--in principle, at least--to build an electronic machine that can do everything a human brain can do. They just think people like Dennett misunderstand the import of such a prospect: rather than bury old puzzles about consciousness, it resurrects them in clearer form than ever...
Consider, says Chalmers, the robot named Cog, being developed at M.I.T.'s artificial-intelligence lab with input from Dennett (see following story). Cog will someday have "skin"--a synthetic membrane sensitive to contact. Upon touching an object, the skin will send a data packet to the "brain." The brain may then instruct the robot to recoil from the object, depending on whether the object could damage the robot. When human beings recoil from things, they too are under the influence of data packets. If you touch something that's dangerously hot, the appropriate electrical impulses go from hand to brain...
...course, it's always possible that Cog does have a kind of consciousness--a consideration that neither Dennett nor Chalmers rules out. But even then the mystery would persist, for you could still account for all the behavior by talking about physical processes, without ever mentioning feelings. And so too with humans. This, says Chalmers, is the mystery of the "extraness" of consciousness. And it is crystallized, not resolved, by advances in artificial intelligence. Because however human machines become--however deftly they someday pass the Turing test, however precisely their data flow mirrors the brain's data flow--everything they...
...extraness problem is what Chalmers calls one of the "hard" questions of consciousness. What Dennett does, Chalmers says, is skip the "hard" questions and focus on the "easy" questions--and then title his book Consciousness Explained. There is one other "hard" question that Chalmers emphasizes. It--and Dennett's alleged tendency to avoid such questions--is illustrated by something called pandemonium, an AI model that Dennett favors...