On 26 Mar 2014, at 06:01, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/25/2014 9:14 PM, Joseph Knight wrote:
On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 9:52:25 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
On 3/25/2014 6:52 PM, Joseph Knight wrote:
It is trivially a theorem of COMP, since the existence of such a
substitution level is the COMP axiom itself. If COMP is true, then
the substitution level is unknowable (although it can be honed in
upon scientifically).
I have trouble with this. How would you know if your consciousness
were different after the substitution?
COMP is a bet that, if you chose the substitution level correctly,
that "you", whatever "you" are, will survive the substitution.
Yes, I'm well aware of the bet. But if it's impossible to know
whether you won or lost...?
You can consult friends, introspect, make any measurement or think
any thought you could have beforehand.
Why would I trust introspection if at the same time I knew that I
had a drastically different brain? It seems to me it's like the
philosophical zombie problem. I can observe my actions, as can my
friends, and we can agree that I act very much like I did before the
doctor replaced my brain. Since I don't think a philosophical
zombie is possible, per the usual arguments, I must still be
conscious - but I don't have to be Brent Meeker. I could be as
different as someone successfully pretending to be me; maybe even
more different in my ineffable experiences. Just as I am, in a
sense pretending to be the Brent Meeker of years ago.
And you are right to pretend that, even if you cannot prove it, even
to yourself. What you say works also for a night of sleep.
Do we survive a salvia experience, where we can hallucinate having a
(completely) different identity? We think so, because eventually we
reassociate with the memories, and that happen when the amount of
salvinorin is low enough, and that some mechanics in the brain resume
its works, and that is all what we will ask to the doctor to make the
artificial brain to accomplish. A brain is just a natural/biological
personal computer.
I think I agree with what you say below.
Bruno
It's like a change of reference frame in relativity. How do you
"know" that a boost leaves the laws of physics unchanged? You make
any measurement you like, and verify it. You can't know that the
boost didn't cause your brain to act in such a way that you "just
imagined" that the laws of physics were the same, but this is
really just the same as "the laws of physics are the same".
That would be the case if I were the only person and if there were
not a comprehensive theory of relativity relating many other
experimental results.
I generally don't know why thought A comes to me instead of thought
B. I can see that after the substitution you could ask your
friends if you seemed different and you could compare your
remembered past actions and feelings to present ones in similar
circumstances; but it seems to me it would be impossible to say
with any confidence that you had "survived" as a stream of
consciousness.
I don't know what you mean by "stream of consciousness". How could
you ever verify that your "stream of consciousness" is unbroken,
even ignoring the COMP duplication? How you you know that this
moment right now isn't the only "real" moment you've ever
experienced, all the others being false memories? These
distinctions are positivistically meaningless.
Over short periods of time my thoughts overlap in time, which gives
the immediate experince of time and continuity. Of course that
doesn't work over periods of unconsciousness or even sleep. So as
you suggest "introspecting" above, I can introspect short term
continuity. Longer term I rely on memory and its consilience with
present perception: Rooms are as I remember them. People are as I
remember them and they say they remember me. In short I have theory-
of-the-world that works and that IS positivistically meaningful (not
that I'm a fan of positivism).
If your friends said to acted similar to before, maybe a little
different, couldn't it be with quite rather different internal
narrative - just as a good actor could pretend and act like you.
If the actor is good enough, it IS you.
But what if he's only good enough to fool my friends; my friends who
are making allowances that I may be a little different after the
doctor's operation?
This reminds me of something Maudlin brought up in a review of
Penrose's second consciousness book. He points out that OF COURSE a
computer can be programmed to behave just like Penrose -- i.e. pass
a Turing Test as Penrose, answering exactly how Penrose would
answer. This is completely uncontroversial, and for me, it "proves"
COMP scientifically. If an agent can pass the Turing Test, it is
conscious -- this is what we mean when we call other agents
conscious. In fact, this is how we verify that we have been
conscious in the past -- by Turing Testing our memories of ourselves.
But my point is that it's a pretty coarse test. We don't know
ourselves that well; That undetectable failure to survive might be
easy to come by.
Brent
Brent
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