On 21 Jul 2011, at 12:50, Craig Weinberg wrote:
I don't have a problem with living neurological systems extending
their functionality with mechanical prosthetics, it's the other way
around that is more of an issue. People driving cars doesn't mean cars
driving human minds.
Sure, but we do both: robots with neurons, and animals, including
humans, with the brain partially replaced by artificial neurons.
Anyway, if you think molecules are needed, that is, that the level of
substitution includes molecular activity, this too can be emulated by
a computer. The only way to negate computationalism consists in
pretending there is some NON Turing-emulable activity going on in the
brain, and relevant for consciousness. In that case, there is no
possible level of digital substitution.
Note that all physical phenomena known today are Turing emulable,
even, in some sense, quantum indeterminacy (in the QM without
collapse) where the indeterminacy is a first person view of a
digitalisable self-multiplication experiment.
All what consciousness (and matter) needs is a sufficiently rich
collection of self-referential relations. It happens that the numbers,
by the simple laws of addition and multiplication provides already
just that. Adding some ontological elements can only make the mind
body problem more complex to even just formulate.
Bruno
On Jul 21, 5:48 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 21 Jul 2011, at 00:58, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 4:40 AM, Craig Weinberg
<whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
Chickens can walk around for a while without a head also. It
doesn't
mean that air is a viable substitute for a head, and it doesn't
mean
that the head isn't producing a different quality of awareness than
it
does under typical non-mortally wounded conditions.
I think you have failed to address the point made by several
people so
far, which is that if the replacement neurons can interact with the
remaining biological neurons in a normal way, then it is not
possible
for there to be a change in consciousness. The important thing is
**behaviour of the replacement neurons from the point of view of the
biological neurons**.
And interfacing biological neurons with non biological circuits is
not
sci.fi., nowadays.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-0eZytv6Qk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QPiF4-iu6g&feature=fvwrel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EvOlJp5KIY
This is NOT a proof, nor even strong evidences for computationalism,
but it is strong evidence that humans will believe in comp, and
practice it, no matter what.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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