On 24 February 2014 11:45, David Nyman <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
Replacement with computer chips, which he agrees is at least theoretically possible. >> 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). I found the quote, from Searle, J. 1992 The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, Mass : The MIT Press, Bradford Books): "As the silicon is progressively implanted into your dwindling brain, you find that the area of your conscious experience is shrinking, but that this shows no effect on your external behavior. You find, to your total amazement, that you are indeed losing control of your external behavior. You find, for example, that when the doctors test your vision, you hear them say, "We are holding up a red object in front of you; please tell us what you see." You want to cry out, "I can't see anything. I'm going totally blind." But you hear your voice saying in a way that is completely out of your control, "I see a red object in front of me". To be fair, I don't have the book and found this from Google Books. He considers another two possibilities from brain replacement: that the result is a normally functioning and normally conscious person, or that the result is a person with normal consciousness but abnormal behaviour. I think he would have to exclude both of these given that, respectively, he does not believe that computers can be conscious and he agrees that computers can in theory replicate the behaviour of the brain. He should also reject the quoted position on the basis of his biological naturalism, for what is doing the thinking if not the brain? -- 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 [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.
