Small things
Jul. 8th, 2012 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davvApparently there are such things as physicalist dragons. I was really surprised when I first found one, but they do exist!
I'm not one, but I know the evidence, so to call it, I have is incommunicable. One could make a robot that would utter the same sentences, and so a third person hearing the claims could not know whether they were true just by hearing them.
(Jaron Lanier had an amusing thought that the way to distinguish "robots" like the above from real people was to check whether they could hold a dualist position. But even if he were right, making use of it could lead us on that old dangerous path of "us vs them".)
I'm not one, but I know the evidence, so to call it, I have is incommunicable. One could make a robot that would utter the same sentences, and so a third person hearing the claims could not know whether they were true just by hearing them.
(Jaron Lanier had an amusing thought that the way to distinguish "robots" like the above from real people was to check whether they could hold a dualist position. But even if he were right, making use of it could lead us on that old dangerous path of "us vs them".)