On Saturday, March 1, 2014 7:42:13 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: > > > > On Saturday, March 1, 2014, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com<javascript:>> > wrote: > >> >> >> On Saturday, March 1, 2014 1:57:45 AM UTC-5, Liz R wrote: >>> >>> On 28 February 2014 15:22, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>>> On Thursday, February 27, 2014 8:03:15 PM UTC-5, Liz R wrote: >>>> >>>>> On 28 February 2014 03:02, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> 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. >
I think that you have too naive a view of what function means. > 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. > It has nothing to do with not being able to figure out how humans work.Nothing to do with human consciousness or biology at all. I'm *always* only talking about the bare metal basics of awareness itself. Sensation. Detection. Signal. You take them for granted, but I don't. If you take them for granted, then it is no great surprise that you can imagine consciousness coming from function. > 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. > It doesn't matter where they are generated, all that matters is whether possession of one's own function can be defined as a computable object under functionalism. I think that it is a clear double standard to say that the 'mine-ness' of a hand can of course be detected, but the 'mine-ness' of a human experience would require zombies to justify. You're looking at the wrong thing. I don't care about the details of any particular machine or organism, I care about the properties of awareness being incompatible in every way to the properties of function unless awareness comes first. Craig > > > -- > 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-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.
