On 12/14/2012 4:19 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 11:47 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com
<mailto:whatsons...@gmail.com>> wrote:
I don't see how you can come to that conclusion. There is nothing in
what I feel
that would provide me with any certainty that my brain is not being
manipulated
by someone by remote control, for example. That possibility is
entirely consistent with my subjective feeling of freedom.
Of course that's possible. In fact it is a common psychotic delusion.
Indeed, we are
complex and have many competing aspects of our self with different agendas.
The
reason why it doesn't make sense however, is why would any process exist
which
creates an epiphenomenal person such as you. By extension, that is the
problem with
mechanism and functionalism as well. If you have a perfectly good computer
which
operates a robot navigating a physical world whose purpose is to survive and
reproduce, what would be the advantage of generating an internal
representation
delusion to some made up 'person' program when the computer is already
controlling
the robot perfectly well.
It is necessary that the computer, or any intelligent actor, have an internal
representation of itself in order to contemplate and plan its future actions and decide
whether it can successfully execute a plan and what the value of the result will be. This
evaluation of plans requires simulation of events including the actor; so the actor must
represent itself in the simulation and estimate what its internal states will be - will it
have satisfied some goals, will it be damaged or destroyed, will it gain or lose.
Brent
It would be like installing an chip inside of your computer to simulate an
impressionist painter who actually paints tiny paintings for a made up
audience of
puppets to think that they are looking at. Even then, you still have the
Explanatory
Gap/homunculus problem. You still ARE NO CLOSER to closing the gap as now
you have
an interior 'model' which has no mechanism for perception. You have just
moved the
Cartesian Theater inside of biochemistry, but it still explains nothing
about how
you get from endogenous light to endogenous eyes which see images through
biophotons
rather than are simply informed of their quantitative significance directly
and
digitally.
You have just presented an argument for why consciousness is a necessary side-effect of
intelligent behaviour. If it were not so, then there would have been no reason for
consciousness to have evolved.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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