1 Forum Post by "TheAwsomeOpossum"
At 2/19/13 08:08 PM, naronic wrote: You walk down the street, you see people, you're in your classroom, you look at people, you post on the BBS, you expect people to post back.
What people? You mean the people your minds image provides you with? How do you know anyone is not an mindless drone here to convince you of the world you live in?
Aliens could've abducted you from another planet on a world populated with only robotic clones of people to collect data as far as you know.
The epistemological problem of other minds, in that it is impossible to know whether they exist or not.
There's multiple problems such as Metaphysical solipsism that say it is impossible for there to be other minds in existence except for yours.
Some people have futility attempted to avert this problem with the Reductionist view.
"The reductionist viewpoint, supported by John McDowell and others, has tried to tackle the first two propositions 1 and 2 (above), by putting forth certain modes of expression (such as being in pain) as privileged and allowing us direct access to the other's mind. Thus, although they would admit from the problem of pretense, that at no one time can we claim to have access to another's mental state, they are not permanently unavailable to us."
But the problems still stands, you are not aware of any other minds but your own.
This can lead to great implications as we get closer to inventing chat robots that can act completely like us, the future will open up to all sorts of fraud, murder, and general warfare to come.
In the future if someone wanted to do you harm they could just order a robot that looks/feels/acts just like your wife or kids and will be programmed to stab you while you're sleeping.
Do you believe this problem is solvable?
If so what solution would you propose?
Yes, there are ways to get around philosophical solipsism. But those methods tend to reject correspondence theory of truth, which makes some people hesitant about them. My favorite technique is simply using pragmatic theory of truth instead, but some people don't like the consequences of accepting it too much.
In terms of the robots, we are just going to have to be very careful. I'm more concerned about those who are attempting to develop machines that can look at your mind to determine what you are thinking to some degree. This can be very powerful for fixing diseases, but can also be a horrible invasion of privacy. I'm also a bit worried about the new technology that's supposedly being developed which can synthesize touch. That could be really bad in the wrong hands.
