If you have a mind that cannot communicate, figuring out what it feels is not your biggest problem. Saying anything about such a mind is a challenge. Although I’m confident much can be said, even if I can’t explain the algorithm how exactly that would work.
It seems you are no longer ruling out a science of other minds, Are you still insisting that robots don’t feel pain?
but I don’t necessarily understand what it would mean for a different kind of mind.
I’ve already told you what it would mean, but you have a self-imposed problem of tying meaning to proof.
Consider a scenario where two people are discussing something of dubious detectability.
Unbeknownst to them, halfway through the conversation a scientist on the other side of the world invents a unicorn detector, tachyone detector, etc.
Is the first half of the conversation meaningful and the second half meaningless? What kind of influence travels from the scientists lab?
It seems you are no longer ruling out a science of other minds
No, by “mind” I just mean any sort of information processing machine. I would have said “brain”, but you used a more general “entity”, so I went with “mind”. The question of what is and isn’t a mind is not very interesting to me.
I’ve already told you what it would mean
Where exactly?
Is the first half of the conversation meaningful and the second half meaningless?
First of all, the meaningfulness of words depends on the observer. “Robot pain” is perfectly meaningful to people with precise definitions of “pain”. So, in the worst case, the “thing” remains meaningless to the people discussing it, and it remains meaningful to the scientist (because you can’t make a detector if you don’t already know what exactly you’re trying to detect). We could then simply say that that the people and the scientist are using the same word for different things.
It’s also possible that the “thing” was meaningful to everyone to begin with. I don’t know what “dubious detectability” is. My bar for meaningfulness isn’t as high as you may think, though. “Robot pain” has to fail very hard so as not to pass it.
The idea that with models of physics, it might sometimes be hard to tell which features are detectable and which are just mathematical machinery, is in general a good one. Problem is that it requires good understanding of the model, which neither of us has. And I don’t expect this sort of poking to cause problems that I couldn’t patch, even in the worst case.
It seems you are no longer ruling out a science of other minds, Are you still insisting that robots don’t feel pain?
I’ve already told you what it would mean, but you have a self-imposed problem of tying meaning to proof.
Consider a scenario where two people are discussing something of dubious detectability.
Unbeknownst to them, halfway through the conversation a scientist on the other side of the world invents a unicorn detector, tachyone detector, etc.
Is the first half of the conversation meaningful and the second half meaningless? What kind of influence travels from the scientists lab?
No, by “mind” I just mean any sort of information processing machine. I would have said “brain”, but you used a more general “entity”, so I went with “mind”. The question of what is and isn’t a mind is not very interesting to me.
Where exactly?
First of all, the meaningfulness of words depends on the observer. “Robot pain” is perfectly meaningful to people with precise definitions of “pain”. So, in the worst case, the “thing” remains meaningless to the people discussing it, and it remains meaningful to the scientist (because you can’t make a detector if you don’t already know what exactly you’re trying to detect). We could then simply say that that the people and the scientist are using the same word for different things.
It’s also possible that the “thing” was meaningful to everyone to begin with. I don’t know what “dubious detectability” is. My bar for meaningfulness isn’t as high as you may think, though. “Robot pain” has to fail very hard so as not to pass it.
The idea that with models of physics, it might sometimes be hard to tell which features are detectable and which are just mathematical machinery, is in general a good one. Problem is that it requires good understanding of the model, which neither of us has. And I don’t expect this sort of poking to cause problems that I couldn’t patch, even in the worst case.