On 02 Apr 2015, at 14:00, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 2 April 2015 at 18:26, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> 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.
Yes.
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?
It is just that I can logically conceive this (still playing the devil
advocate role):
The doctor assures me that my behavior will not change, but that my
qualia and consciousness intensity will diminish of one halve, but he
add that this change is anosognosic so that I will not feel any
difference ... until I can afford the better artificial brain. So I
say "yes" to him, and indeed I feel completely happy with the new
brain ... until I get enough money for the new brain, which the doctor
told me, will make my volume of consciousness back to normal (of
course I have no idea at all what that could mean). But once I got the
new brain, I realize then that indeed, I was less conscious than
before the first brain operation, and that now, I feel like that again.
Some type of dreams make me thing that such an experience might not be
as senseless as ti might seem, and this means that the weird
anosognosia condition might, perhaps, give sense to some notion of
partial zombiness.
Some people in this list defend the idea of "volume or degree of
consciousness", and if there is anosognosia on such a volume or
intensity, it might gives some sense to some notion of partial
zombiness, it seems to me (currently).
Bruno
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Stathis Papaioannou
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