I suggest to stop treating this as a philosophical problem, and approach it as an engineering problem. (Philosophers are rewarded for generating smart-sounding sequences of words. Engineers are rewarded for designing technical solutions that work.
How do you tell what works? Did someone invent a consciousness detector?
I suggest to focus on the technical difficulties of designing the stick whose length happens to encode the mental state of an old man walking his dog, without somehow simulating the old man at the same time.
Imagining such stick… is kinda easy, because imagination is not constrained by being logically consistent. I can imagine that the stick just happens to have the right length all the time, without asking myself by which mechanism such thing might possibly happen. Even if we assume amazing sci-fi mechanisms of the 24th century, thinking about technology still makes us focus on “how”.
(Similar approach can be applied to other philosophical questions. Such as: how would you design a robot that has a free will? How would you detect which robots have a free will, and which ones don’t?)
How do you tell what works? Did someone invent a consciousness detector?
I suggest to focus on the technical difficulties of designing the stick whose length happens to encode the mental state of an old man walking his dog, without somehow simulating the old man at the same time.
Imagining such stick… is kinda easy, because imagination is not constrained by being logically consistent. I can imagine that the stick just happens to have the right length all the time, without asking myself by which mechanism such thing might possibly happen. Even if we assume amazing sci-fi mechanisms of the 24th century, thinking about technology still makes us focus on “how”.
(Similar approach can be applied to other philosophical questions. Such as: how would you design a robot that has a free will? How would you detect which robots have a free will, and which ones don’t?)
I think it can be applied to free will and doesn’t lead to the sceptical conclusion usual round here.