On Sunday, October 6, 2013 5:06:31 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 06 Oct 2013, at 03:17, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > On 5 October 2013 00:40, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be <javascript:>> > wrote: > > > >>> The argument is simply summarised thus: it is impossible even for > >>> God > >>> to make a brain prosthesis that reproduces the I/O behaviour but has > >>> different qualia. This is a proof of comp, > >> > >> > >> Hmm... I can agree, but eventually no God can make such a > >> prothesis, only > >> because the qualia is an attribute of the "immaterial person", and > >> not of > >> the brain, body, or computer. Then the prosthesis will manifest > >> the person > >> if it emulates the correct level. > > > > But if the qualia are attributed to the substance of the physical > > brain then where is the problem making a prosthesis that replicates > > the behaviour but not the qualia? > > The problem is that it would allow > > one to make a partial zombie, which I think is absurd. Therefore, the > > qualia cannot be attributed to the substance of the physical brain. > > I agree. > > Note that in that case the qualia is no more attributed to an > immaterial person, but to a piece of primary matter. > In that case, both comp and functionalism (in your sense, not in > Putnam's usual sense of functionalism which is a particular case of > comp) are wrong. > > Then, it is almost obvious that an immaterial being cannot distinguish > between a primarily material incarnation, and an immaterial one, as it > would need some magic (non Turing emulable) ability to make the > difference. People agreeing with this do no more need the UDA step 8 > (which is an attempt to make this more rigorous or clear). > > I might criticize, as a devil's advocate, a little bit the partial- > zombie argument. Very often some people pretend that they feel less > conscious after some drink of vodka, but that they are still able to > behave normally. Of course those people are notoriously wrong. It is > just that alcohol augments a fake self-confidence feeling, which > typically is not verified (in the laboratory, or more sadly on the > roads). Also, they confuse "less conscious" with "blurred > consciousness",
Why wouldn't less consciousness have the effect of seeming blurred? If your battery is dying in a device, the device might begin to fail in numerous ways, but those are all symptoms of the battery dying - of the device becoming less reliable as different parts are unavailable at different times. Think of qualia as a character in a long story, which is divided into episodes. If, for instance, someone starts watching a show like Breaking Bad only in the last season, they have no explicit understanding of who Walter White is or why he behaves like he does, where Jesse came from, etc. They can only pick up what is presented directly in that episode, so his character is relatively flat. The difference between the appreciation of the last episode by someone who has seen the entire series on HDTV and someone who has only read the closed captioning of the last episode on Twitter is like the difference between a human being's qualia and the qualia which is available through a logical imitation of a human bring. Qualia is experience which contains the felt relation to all other experiences; specific experiences which directly relate, and extended experiential contexts which extent to eternity (totality of manifested events so far relative to the participant plus semi-potential events which relate to higher octaves of their participation...the bigger picture with the larger now.) Human psychology is not a monolith. Blindsight already *proves* that 'we can be a partial zombie' from our 1p perspective. I have tried to make my solution to the combination problem here: http://multisenserealism.com/thesis/6-panpsychism/eigenmorphism/ What it means is that it is a mistake to say "we can be a partial zombie" - rather the evidence of brain injuries and surgeries demonstrate that the extent to which we are who we expect ourselves to be, or that others expect a person to be, can be changed in many quantitative and qualitative ways. We may not be less conscious after a massive debilitating stroke, but what is conscious after that is less of us. This is because consciousness is not a function or a process, it is the sole source of presence. Qualia is what we are made of. As human beings at this stage of human civilization, our direct qualia is primarily cognitive-logical-verbal. We identify with our ability to describe with words - to qualify other qualia as verbal qualia. We name our perceptions and name our naming power 'mind', but that is not consciousness. Logic and intellect can only name public-facing reductions of certain qualia (visible and tangible qualia - the stuff of public bodies). The name for those public-facing reductions is quanta, or numbers, and the totality of the playing field which can be used for the quanta game is called arithmetic truth. Craig > I think. > So I think we are in agreement. > Yes, you are both making the same mistake. Conflating the unity of trivial self-identification with the aesthetic reality of experiential presence. Craig > (I usually use "functionalism" in Putnam's sense, but your's or > Chalmers' use is more logical, yet more rarely used in the community > of philosopher of mind, but that's a vocabulary issue). > > Bruno > > > > > > >> If not, even me, can do a brain prothesis that reproduce the > >> consciousness > >> of a sleeping dreaming person, ... > >> OK, I guess you mean the full I/O behavior, but for this, I am not > >> even sure > >> that my actual current brain can be enough, ... if only because "I" > >> from the > >> first person point of view is distributed in infinities of > >> computations, and > >> I cannot exclude that the qualia (certainly stable lasting qualia) > >> might > >> rely on that. > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >>> provided that brain physics > >>> is computable, or functionalism if brain physics is not computable. > >>> Non-comp functionalism may entail, for example, that the replacement > >>> brain contain a hypercomputer. > >> > >> > >> OK. > >> > >> Bruno > > > > > > -- > > Stathis Papaioannou > > > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > > Groups "Everything List" group. > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, > > send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. > > To post to this group, send email to > > everyth...@googlegroups.com<javascript:>. > > > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
