On 3/20/2018 1:14 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Wed, 21 Mar 2018 at 6:34 am, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> 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.
Then why draw the line at "surrounding tissue". Why not the external
enivironment?
Are you saying you can't imagine being "conscious" but in a different way?
Brent
--
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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.