On 5/12/2015 12:34 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 12 May 2015, at 10:37 am, Russell Standish <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 10:23:31AM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
The final straw would have to be indivisible, otherwise you could make a
partial zombie by replacing half the straw.
I disagree. The final straw either works, or does not work. If you
replace half the straw, then the resulting half-straw either works or
it doesn't, and that directly affects whether you have a conscious
entity or not. No need to invoke a partial zombie.
It would lead to a strange form of computationalism: you could replace say 40%
of the brain without any problem, but go to 40.00000001% and consciousness gies
off.
It's what happens in the real world all the time. One moment you have
a whole working network - the next you have pieces. Consider
dismantling an engine. 3 screws out, and the engine still idles. Take
the 4th out, and the head falls off.
It could work that way with consciousness, and going from full consciousness to
full zombie would be a way to avoid the absurdity of partial zombies. But it
would have the following consequences:
Physiologically, qualia do in fact fade in parallel with function as neurons
are destroyed, but if the neurons are replaced, this relationship between
function and qualia is overturned. The artificial neurons can sustain the
consciousness that would otherwise have been lost, so computationalism is true
to this extent, but they lose this capability at a certain threshold. Two
beings with partial brain replacements could differ only in the smallest
possible increment such as the position of an electron, but one is a zombie and
the other fully conscious.
I don't understand you reference to fading qualia. Chalmers argued that there could not
be fading qualia in a transistion from a biological brain to a functionally identical
silicon chip brain. That doesn't rule out qualia fading as neurons or transistors are
simply lost from the system. In that case I think it quite likely that qualia will
"fade". And "fading" may me loss of some aspect of qualia. For example we could lose
color vision if we lost the cone receptors in our retinas.
Brent
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