On Saturday, March 1, 2014 7:42:13 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: > > > > On Saturday, March 1, 2014, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]<javascript:>> > 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. >
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 [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.
