On Saturday, March 1, 2014, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Saturday, March 1, 2014 1:57:45 AM UTC-5, Liz R wrote: >> >> On 28 February 2014 15:22, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> On Thursday, February 27, 2014 8:03:15 PM UTC-5, Liz R wrote: >>> >>>> On 28 February 2014 03:02, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> >>>>> >>>>> In other words, why, in a functionalist/materialist world would we >>>>> need a breakable program to keep telling us that our hand is not Alien? >>>>> >>>>> Or contrariwise, why do you need a breakable programme to tell you >>>> that it's your hand? >>>> >>> >>> Sure, that too. It doesn't make sense functionally. What difference does >>> it make 'who' the hand 'belongs' to, as long as it performs as a hand. >>> >> >> It's important for an animal to be able to distinguish self from >> non-self, as can be seen if two animals are locked in combat - one that >> can't tell its own limb from its opponent's is just as likely to bite >> itself as its prey. Repeat that often enough and you have a strong >> evolutionary pressure to distinguish self from non-self. I would imagine >> alien hand syndrome is a breakdown of this system. >> > > Sure, but I don't see that functionalism provides a basis to distinguish > self from non-self other than function. As long as the functionality of the > hand is there, and other people cannot tell any difference in what the hand > can do, there should be no basis for any particular distress. We could make > up a different evolutionary story too - that being physically close to your > family or social group is important to survival and reproduction, so that > there is a strong evolutionary pressure to suppress the difference between > self and not-self. If it were the case that AHS were a breakdown in a > global system like that, I would expect that victims might identify their > family as strangers, etc. > > The particulars aren't the important thing though. I use AHS to add to > blindsight and synesthesia as examples where the function-feeling > equivalence which functionalism depends on appears to be violated. > You have too simplistic a view of what "function" means in the context of an intelligent being. That is actually your whole problem: you look at machine, imagine that you can see how it works, then look at a human, can't figure out how it works, so conclude there must be something non-machine like in the human. Yet the very examples you use demonstrate that even mysterious-seeming behaviours such as those displayed in ALH are generated by neural circuitry which can be easily disrupted. -- 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.
