On 3/20/2018 1:14 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Wed, 21 Mar 2018 at 6:34 am, Brent Meeker <[email protected] <mailto:[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.
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 [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.
