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.

Reply via email to