Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mine was a straight question you should be able to answer directly for any debate to go forward, not any "rhetorical move" nor any "approach" involving anything. Any rhetorical moves or approaches of mine, reductive or not, conceding or refuting, would come after your answer but couldn't come before it because your point needs this disambiguation. So again: please, without resorting to tautology from which anything c…
Consciousness is identical to the presence of qualia, that there is something rather than nothing, that the lights are on. ‘Reductive’ means the assumption that all phenomena reduce to what represent them in an external model or linguistic description. Science, language, and reason are fundamentally reductive. So in practice the reductive assumption is just denying that things have an existence which is not identical…
Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?
#111The problem with non-reductive definitions such as the one you just gave there is that they don't have much information at all. What are those "lights" that are on when you say there is consciousness, apart from the presence of consciousness itself, the same thing that should be defined by that phrase? The presence of qualia is only possible, by definition, when there is already a consciousness that experiments them, but what is this? What is that something that you contrast with nothing, and how is it different from any other somethings like rocks, if at all? That just avoids defining at all.