Posted: Apr 18, 2014 5:44 pm
Teuton wrote:
No, because consciousness is a biological phenomenon. So, if you plan to construct a conscious robot, you have to construct a physical equivalent of an animal organism, and especially of an animal nervous system.
The only examples we know of are biological, but that in not sufficient to determine that the only poissibl form is biological.
The same is true of life. It's reasonable to look for life where biological life as we know it could exist, it's not absolute that only carbon chemistry around 200 - 300K is the only possibility.
Teuton wrote:If plants could evolve into conscient organisms, they would be animals—but they aren't and cannot become ones.
Isn't that just playing with definitions?
Teuton wrote:The so-called awareness of plants has nothing to do with consciousness. To say that plants are (functionally, nonphenomenally) aware of their environment is only to say that they contain a signal-detecting, -processing and reactively, adaptively behavior-regulating physiological mechanism. The physico-chemical processes involved therein are wholly objective, lacking any subjective, experiential content whatsoever. There's nothing psychophysical or psychochemical about them.
I don't really disagree about that, but unless you know how meat is conscious it's unjustified to absolutely conclude that vegetation cannot do the same thing.