What you've done here is expose an epistemological problem but not the ontological one under consideration.
My ontological premises are: consciousness exists and it is a neurochemical process.
From this follows: machines which are not instances of this process are not conscious.
Now you have basically said: but we do not know for certain that it is this neurobiochemical process that accounts for consciousness. Isnt it reasonable to suppose that we might encounter things not actually conscious and think they are? YES. Isnt it reasonable, therefore, to suppose that "consciousness" isnt actually ontologically the same thing as this neurobiochemical process? NO!!
The magnitude of human foolishness is no guide to what exists and what it is like: our being able to be fooled by anything tells us little.
Yes, we can reverse the picture for the spinning-top and dog. But this is an epistemic reversal: we can suppose we are being fooled by the dog, but the spinning top is the truth!
This seems highly unlikely for reasons basically summarized as, "science works".
The spinning top isn't thinking and the dog is. That it is possible to doubt this claim, ie., that it fails to be certain, tells us nothing. Almost all scientific claims fail to be certain, that's neither here nor there as to whether they are accurate.
And I am appealing to no ghosts to draw distinctions between dogs and spinning tops. I am appealing to a reasonable scientific inference: let us modify the dogs behaviour and let us modify the spinning tops. Cocaine might well be involved in the former, or neurosurgery -- and in the latter, wood carving.
The distinction between a chisel and cocaine is hopefully clear enough: they act on their target objects in extremely different ways. The way that cocaine acts informs what stuff I take to comprise "consciousness" -- that is how the behaviour of the dog is modified.
> skillful concernful action does not exist. It is merely illusions
I dont know what you mean by "illusion" here. I don't see why the observation that skilllful actions is a bodily process somehow diminishes its reality. Skillfull action is just what people do in order to achieve their goals, we have discovered all of these things are biochemical but that doesnt make them fake.
If we observe the target phenomenon "skillful action" we discover is it biological. This rules out silicon and electric doing it. Or, in other words, to modify the behaviour of a machine I cannot use cocaine. It has no thoughts to disrupt. I'd have more luck with a chisel.
My ontological premises are: consciousness exists and it is a neurochemical process.
From this follows: machines which are not instances of this process are not conscious.
Now you have basically said: but we do not know for certain that it is this neurobiochemical process that accounts for consciousness. Isnt it reasonable to suppose that we might encounter things not actually conscious and think they are? YES. Isnt it reasonable, therefore, to suppose that "consciousness" isnt actually ontologically the same thing as this neurobiochemical process? NO!!
The magnitude of human foolishness is no guide to what exists and what it is like: our being able to be fooled by anything tells us little.
Yes, we can reverse the picture for the spinning-top and dog. But this is an epistemic reversal: we can suppose we are being fooled by the dog, but the spinning top is the truth!
This seems highly unlikely for reasons basically summarized as, "science works".
The spinning top isn't thinking and the dog is. That it is possible to doubt this claim, ie., that it fails to be certain, tells us nothing. Almost all scientific claims fail to be certain, that's neither here nor there as to whether they are accurate.
And I am appealing to no ghosts to draw distinctions between dogs and spinning tops. I am appealing to a reasonable scientific inference: let us modify the dogs behaviour and let us modify the spinning tops. Cocaine might well be involved in the former, or neurosurgery -- and in the latter, wood carving.
The distinction between a chisel and cocaine is hopefully clear enough: they act on their target objects in extremely different ways. The way that cocaine acts informs what stuff I take to comprise "consciousness" -- that is how the behaviour of the dog is modified.
> skillful concernful action does not exist. It is merely illusions
I dont know what you mean by "illusion" here. I don't see why the observation that skilllful actions is a bodily process somehow diminishes its reality. Skillfull action is just what people do in order to achieve their goals, we have discovered all of these things are biochemical but that doesnt make them fake.
If we observe the target phenomenon "skillful action" we discover is it biological. This rules out silicon and electric doing it. Or, in other words, to modify the behaviour of a machine I cannot use cocaine. It has no thoughts to disrupt. I'd have more luck with a chisel.