On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 2:58 AM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> Just to be clear, I'm interested in a slightly different question which > relative to Stathis might be phrased as "function of what?" If we look at > the whole person/robot we talk about behavior, which I think is enough to > establish some kind of consciousness, but not necessarily to map each > instance of a behavior to a specific conscious thought. People can be > thinking different things while performing the same act. So unless we > specify "same behavior" to mean "same input/output for all possible input > sequences" there is room for same behavior and different consciousness. And > this same kind of analysis applies to subsets of the brain as well as to the > whole person. So in Stathis example of replacing half the brain with a > super AI module which has the same input/output relation with the body and > the other half of the brain, it is not at all clear to me that the person's > consciousness is unchanged. Stathis relies on it being *reported* as > unchanged because the speech center is in the other half, but where is the > "consciousness center"? It may be that we're over-idealizing the isolation > of the brain. If the super AI half were perfectly isolated except for those > input/output channels which we are hypothesizing to be perfectly emulating > the dumb brain then Stathis argument would show that what ever change in > consciousness might be inside the super AI side it would be undetectable. > But in fact the super AI side cannot be perfectly isolated to those > channels, even aside from quantum entanglement there are thermal > perturbations and radioactivity. This means that the super AI will produce > different behavior because it will respond differently under these > perturbations. This different behavior will evince its different > consciousness. There will be a certain level of engineering tolerance in brain replacement since there is a level of tolerance in the normal brain. We might not notice a change despite a significant physical change such as thousands of neurons dying. > So in saying 'yes' to the doctor you should either be ready to assume some > difference in consciousness or suppose that the substitution level may > encompass a significant part of the Milky Way down to the fundamental > particle level. I'd be happy if the new brain didn't change my consciousness any more than getting through a normal day would. -- 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.
