On 2/23/2014 9:26 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
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".
Greg Egan wrote a short story "The Jewel" on this theme. At maturity, before one's brain
starts to deteriorate, everyone has their brain replaces by a "jewel" that encodes and
functionally replaces their brain but which will not deteriorate with age. Of course, in
the story, the subject discovers he is conscious but has no control over his body and he
here's himself telling people that he is conscious just as before and there's been no
change. So really the story idea is that the original consciousness loses control of the
body but continues to perceive and to think a narrative life story which it remembers.
Since everyone who has the operation to install a "jewel" reports that it works perfectly,
everyone continues to volunteer for the replacement.
Brent
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?
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