> On 3 Apr 2015, at 12:26 am, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>> On 02 Apr 2015, at 14:00, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>
> 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.
But you would not notice such a difference when you got the new brain, since
the outputs are exactly the same. You could set it up in a try-before-you-buy
test so that the cheaper and the more expensive visual cortex can be switched
in and out of circuit and you would find that both are just the same. If there
is a difference in your qualia not only is it impossible for an external
observer to notice, it is also impossible for you, the experiencer, to notice.
I don't think the word "qualia" can retain meaning under this sort of assault.
> 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).
I think anosognosia is a red herring. You might not notice something because
the change is too subtle, because you forgot what it was like before, or
because (as in anosognosia) your ability to reason is impaired. But the thought
experiment is done under ideal circumstances, where the change is large and
your ability to think and remember is intact. If you can't notice a change in
qualia under such circumstances then I would say that under any reasonable
definition of the term there *IS* no change in qualia.
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