On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 5:03 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: > If anyone is not familiar with David Chalmers "Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, > Dancing Qualia" You should have a look at it first. > > This thought experiment is intended to generalize principles common to both > computationalism and functionalism so that the often confusing objections > surrounding their assumptions can be revealed. > > Say that we have the technology to scan the city of New York by means of > releasing 100,000 specially fitted cats into the streets, which will return > to the laboratory in a week's time with a fantastically large amount of data > about what the cats see and feel, smell and taste, hear, their positions and > movements relative to each other, etc. > > We now set about computing algorithms to simulate the functions of Brooklyn > such that we can tear down Brooklyn completely and replace it with a > simulation which causes cats released into the simulated environment to > behave in the same way as they would have according to the history of their > initial release. > > Indeed, cats in Manhattan travel to and from Brooklyn as usual. Perhaps to > get this right, we had to take all of Brooklyn and grind it up in a giant > blender until it becomes a paste of liquified corpses, garbage, concrete, > wood, and glass, and then use this substrate to mold into objects that can > be moved around remotely to suit the expectations of the cats. > > Armed with the confidence of the feline thumbs-up, we go ahead and replace > Manhattan and the other boroughs in the same way, effectively turning a city > of millions into a cat-friendly cemetery. While the experiment is not a PR > success (Luddites and Fundamentalists complain loudly about a genocide), our > cats assure us that all is well and the experiment is a great success.
Craig, this post of yours just shows me that you don't understand the paper at all. If I am wrong, perhaps you could summarise it. I suspect that the part you don't understand is what it means to make a functional replacement of a neuron, which means replicating just the third party observable behaviour. I'm not sure if you don't understand "third party observable behaviour" or if you do understand but think it's impossible to replicate it. Perhaps you could clarify by explaining what you think "third party observable behaviour" actually means. -- 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.
