Word: pandemoniums
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...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...
...scientific model, pandemonium has virtues. First, it works; you can run the model successfully on a computer. Second, it works best on massively parallel computers, whose structure resembles the brain's structure. So it's a plausible theory of data flow in the human brain, and of the criteria by which the brain admits some data, but not other data, to consciousness...
...consciousness--the extraness question and the water-into-wine question--don't depend on artificial intelligence. They could occur (and have occurred) to people who simply take the mind-as-machine idea seriously and ponder its implications. But the actual construction of a robot like Cog, or of a pandemonium machine, makes the hard questions more vivid. Materialist dismissals of the mind-body problem may seem forceful on paper, but, says McGinn, "you start to see the limits of a concept once it gets realized." With AI, the tenets of strict materialism are being realized--and found, by some...
...this view, Cog may indeed have consciousness. So might a pandemonium machine. So might a thermostat. Chalmers thinks it quite possible that AI research may someday generate--may now be generating--new spheres of consciousness unsensed by the rest of us. Strange as it may seem, the prospect that we are creating a new species of sentient life is now being taken seriously in philosophy...
...ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THE 1950S, WHEN BLACKS were so rarely on television that the mere sight of one was enough to produce pandemonium in our Washington neighborhood. "Colored on TV," someone would shout from the front porch, and all normal activity ceased as everybody within earshot rushed to the nearest set for a moment of electronic racial solidarity. If somehow you missed the event, you felt seriously deprived. At a time when the civil rights movement was just beginning, seeing blacks on the tube made us feel more like a part of America. We wanted them to be there even...