On Wed, 21 Mar 2018 at 6:34 am, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > 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. > I think it would be conscious in the same way if you replaced neural tissue with a black box that interacted with the surrounding tissue in the same way. It doesn’t matter what is in the black box; it could even work by magic. > -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
