On 5 March 2010 06:43, Jack Mallah <jackmal...@yahoo.com> wrote: >> similarly in your paper where you consider a gradual removal of brain >> tissue. It would have to be very specific surgery to produce the sort of >> delusional state you describe. > > I'm not sure if you overlooked it but the key condition in my paper is that > the inputs to the remaining brain are identical to what they would have been > if the whole brain were present. Thus, the neural activity in the partial > brain is by definition identical to what would have occured in the > corresponding part of a whole brain. It is of course grossly implausible > that this could be done in practice for a real biological brain (for one > thing, you'd pretty much have to know in advance the microscopic details of > everything that would have gone on in the removed part of the brain, or else > guess and get incredibly lucky), but it presents no difficulties in priciple > for a digital simulation, and in any case is a thought experiment.
If the inputs to the remaining brain tissue are the same as they would have been normally then effectively you have replaced the missing parts with a magical processor, and I would say that the thought experiment shows that the consciousness must be replicated in this magical processor. Functionalism is sometimes used interchangeably with computationalism, but computationalism is only a subset of functionalism. It could be, for example, that the brain is not computable because it uses exotic physics of the sort postulated by Penrose. We would then fail in our efforts to make a computer that behaves like a human. However, we could succeed if we used non-computational components. If we replace a neuron with a demon that reproduces its I/O behaviour, the behaviour of the whole brain will be unchanged and its consciousness will also be unchanged. Functionalism is saved, even if computationalism is lost. The main problem I have with "fading qualia" is that it would lead to the possibility of partial zombies. If partial zombies are possible, then I might be a partial zombie now and not know it. I may, for example, have zombie vision: I believe I can see, I can correctly describe everything I look at, but in fact I am completely lacking in visual perception. What am I missing out on? I am apparently not missing out on anything. The zombie vision is just as good, in every objective and subjective sense, as normal vision. So the objection to the fading qualia is either that the qualia won't fade, or if they do fade they will be replaced by zombie qualia that are indistinguishable from normal qualia and we may as well call normal qualia. -- 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-l...@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.
