On 01 Oct 2012, at 18:03, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:46 AM, Craig Weinberg
<[email protected]> 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.
Yes. Anti-mechanist often refer to "the whole is bigger than the
parts", but nowhere else than in computer and engineering is it more
true that the whole is bigger than the part, if only because the whole
put some specific structure on the relation between parts.
We might simplify this by saying that the whole *structural
complexity* grows like an exponential (or more) when the whole
cardinality grows linearly.
Bruno
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
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