2009/8/28 Brent Meeker <meeke...@dslextreme.com>: >>> Is your experience the same? Do you experience "frabjous"? If you >>> put "melody" for "frabjous", you've got synsathesia. I'd say that >>> functional equivalence is relative to the level. At *some* level >>> equal-input-output=>equal-experience, but not at higher levels. >> >> If you have a different experience for the same input, then you don't >> produce the same output. > > If you count experience as "output" that would reduce functionalism to > a meaningless tautology.
The private experience itself is not output, but the behaviour it *might* result in is. If my experience is different, then I might say that I feel different; hence my behaviour might be different. But if I am truly functionally identical following a brain transplant, I will by definition be physically incapable of behaving differently. >>You might on a particular occasion, but you >> won't under all conditions, because you will be able to say there is >> something different about the altered experience; namely, the sky now >> looks frabjous or melodious as well as blue. To have a functionally >> perfect brain replacement is to be guaranteed that *nothing* will >> change, so that you will never even be able to say, "this feels a bit >> weird, but I can't explain exactly how". > > But if functionalism is to be meaningful the level of functional units > for a perfect brain replacement must not vary with experience - > otherwise functionalism threatens to collapse to identicalism (I just > made that up :-) ). > > > I actually expect that our consciousness is very crude, compared to > the information theoretic content of our perception and our biological > function, and we could be easily fooled by the doctor. Suppose we get > a brain that makes the sky look different - but one that forgets how > the sky used to look. Yes, you're right. But I'd pay more to keep everything just the same. -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---