On 3/20/2018 3:58 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
The interesting thing is that you can draw conclusions about consciousness
without being able to define it or detect it.
I agree.
The claim is that IF an entity
is conscious THEN its consciousness will be preserved if brain function is
preserved despite changing the brain substrate.
Ok, this is computationalism. I also bet on computationalism, but I
think we must proceed with caution and not forget that we are just
assuming this to be true. Your thought experiment is convincing but is
not a proof. You do expose something that I agree with: that
non-computationalism sounds silly.
But does it sound so silly if we propose substituting a completely
different kind of computer, e.g. von Neumann architecture or one that
just records everything instead of an episodic associative memory, for
the brain. The Church-Turing conjecture says it can compute the same
functions. But does it instantiate the same consciousness. My
intuition is that it would be "conscious" but in some different way; for
example by having the kind of memory you would have if you could review
of a movie of any interval in your past.
Brent
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