GE Morton wrote: ↑June 17th, 2022, 10:35 pm
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑June 17th, 2022, 8:29 pm
You're just confusing sentience with agency. Although obviously related, those are two distinct concepts. Sentience is more about what the organism experiences, what it feels, senses, or cognizes, while agency specifically points at the actions or behaviors of that organism.
Precisely. And we can know nothing about what an organism feels, senses, cognizes beyond what we can infer from its behavior.
RIght, but the issue here was not about knowing
what an organism feels, senses and cognizes, but
how an organism feels, senses and cognizes. This goes to the point of whether the Google program could feel something or not. Obviously it could not, because the things that allow such experiences are not present in a computing machine.
GE Morton wrote: ↑June 17th, 2022, 10:35 pm
And we can definitely talk about the set of specific mechanisms that make feelings, sensations and cognition possible.
Yes we can, provided we've inferred what it feels and senses --- from its behavior. We would not consider a creature sentient which did not exhibit the requisite behaviors, regardless of what what its nervous system might be doing.
All we need to infer is that it feels and senses, and yes, we might infer that from behaviors, but we can also study the mechanisms that within the organism make possible such feelings and sensations (and behaviors). And so, having identified sentience, we have also identified what is in place for there being sentience. We can see also that some natural and artificial objects lack such mechanisms. Neither rocks, nor Google computers feel anything, no matter how good is the last one in imitating some behaviors of a real sentient being.
GE Morton wrote: ↑June 17th, 2022, 10:35 pm
Actions or behaviors, on the other hand, can be mimicked, which means that different mechanisms can produce outputs that look similar, but are not the same.
That is premise of of the "philosophical zombie" arguments. Those arguments are idle for that reason --- if the presumed sentient creature and the zombie exhibit the same behaviors, they are indistinguishable empirically.
But in real case scenarios, they are never "the same behaviors". Imitation implies very close similarities to what's being imitated, but that does not make each one equivalent to the other.
GE Morton wrote: ↑June 17th, 2022, 10:35 pm
By definition (even if it's just the definition of a mind), a regular, common, everyday, mortal mind is a function of a physical brain attached to a physical body.
Oh, no. Minds are not
defined in terms of bodies. That is why the notion of disembodied minds (souls, consciousnesses) are so ubiquitous. The relationship between them is a contingent fact given a phenomenal model that postulates an external, "physical" world.
No. The disembodiment of the mind is only ubiquitous in the nonsensical world of idealists, which are prone to populate it with immaterial spirits and forces. That concept of mind is a modern development derived from the religious concept of the soul or spirit. In any case, they always needed to attach it to a body, and so the long history of substance dualism. The next step was the attempt by phenomenalists to get rid of the material body altogether, and so the disembodied mind theory came about.