On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:46 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> You're not really answering the question. The neural implants are >> refined to the point where thousands of people are walking around with >> them with no problem. Any objective or subjective test thrown at them >> they pass. There are implants available for every part of the brain. >> You're saying that if someone has 12 implants of the best possible >> design they will be fine, but when they get 13 they will start to act >> strangely. > > > They may or may not act strangely depending on who is defining what strange > is. Think of how Alzheimers progresses. It's not like dementia can be > detected from the first appearance of an amyloid plaque overgrowth. > > It would really be surprising if any brain change didn't follow this > pattern. If you ingest n micrograms of LSD you are fine. If you ingest n+x > micrograms, then you have a psychedelic experience lasting several hours. > The model of the brain that you seem to assume is based on pure mechanistic > assumption. It has no grounding in the physiological realities of what the > brain actually is as a living organ. Physiological realities are mechanistic. Biologists and doctors are mechanists. Even if you claim that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" that does not mean that if yoyu replace the parts the whole will stop working. >> How can you know that this will happen? > > > Because I understand what makes consciousness different from a machine. No, you don't. You claim without any coherent explanation that even an engineer with godlike abilities could not make a replacement brain part that would leave the person functioning normally, and that even if one such part could be made to work surely *two* of them would not! >> You're not just >> saying here that it would be technically difficult, you're saying that >> it would be *impossible* for the implants to work properly. So what >> physical law that you know about and no-one else does would be broken? > > > The implants would work like proper implants, not like proper sub-persons. > Implants have no experiences, therefore a collection of interconnected > implants also have no experiences. If you have enough of a living person's > brain left to be able to still be a person, then that person can learn to > use prosthetic additions and implants to augment functionality or repair > damage, but not replace the person themselves. > > There is no physical law that is broken, there is an assumption of > equivalence which I am exposing as fallacious. But if the implants worked as implants without experiences the person would behave as if everything were fine while internally and impotently noticing that his experiences were disappearing or changing. Do you understand what this 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.
