On 2 April 2015 at 18:26, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > Anosognosia is the inability to recognise when you have an illness or a > disability, usually in the context of neurological or psychiatric > disorders. This differs from being a zombie in that behaviour is affected: > if the patient suffers from cortical blindness with anosognosia, they are > unable to recognise what is in front of them and walk into things. In > addition, they not only have the deficit of lacking qualia, they have a > specific delusional belief which cannot be shifted despite any evidence they > might be presented with. > > > You are right about anosognosia. But my point is that anosognosia might make > conceivable partial zombiness, and thus comp or your functionalism false. > Again, I agree that it would make consciousness spurious, but that is > something to be expected from a computationalist believing in primitive > matter. I just try to put myself in the mind of those people believing in > both matter and mechanism.
Anosognosia involves an additional cognitive deficit which makes the patient deny that he has a problem despite all evidence presented to him. If you damage enough of the brain, it's not surprising that generalised problems in thinking arise. But the case to consider is a person who has a cicumscribed deficit, say in some sensory modality, without a problem in thinking. That such a person might not notice that he has for example gone blind seems absurd. It could mean that you went blind yesterday, although you can still think and hear and feel, but you haven't noticed it, and you still enjoyed looking at the painting on your office wall this morning. If that is possible, then what is the difference between having visual qualia and not having them? To make it more concrete, if the doctor offered me an artificial brain which would leave me blind but with the guarantee that it would *seem* to me that I was seeing everything exactly the same as now, what reason would there be for me to choose the more expensive model which would allow me to *really* see everything the same as now? -- 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/d/optout.
