On 23 February 2014 17:27, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]> wrote:
John Searle in one of his papers proposes that if our brain were being > gradually replaced we would find ourselves losing qualia while declaring > that everything was normal, and being unable to make any protest to the > contrary. > Replaced with what though? I assume he must stipulate non-biological components that supposedly replicate brain "function", although I would guess that the idea of a substitution level hasn't occurred to him explicitly. That said, the idea seems preposterous on its face. > This would imply that we think with something other than our brain, a soul > equivalent, and that in certain situations the brain and this soul > equivalent can become decoupled. > Yes it would seem to imply that. I'd never realised that Searle would infer anything like that on the basis of his so-called biological naturalism. Mind you, since he is at least implicitly a materialist, I never had much of a clue what he meant in appealing to some unspecified non-functional "causal power" of the brain to produce consciousness. AFAIK he never elaborated this beyond a brute stipulation that this is how the brain can bypass his no-semantics-from-syntax prohibition (something like the brain produces consciousness like the liver produces bile). David -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
