On Wed, 21 Mar 2018 at 9:03 am, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On 3/20/2018 1:14 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > 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. > > > Then why draw the line at "surrounding tissue". Why not the external > enivironment? > Keep expanding the part that is replaced and you replace the whole brain and the whole organism. Are you saying you can't imagine being "conscious" but in a different way? > I think it is possible but I don’t think it could happen if my neurones were replaced by a functionally equivalent component. If it’s functionally equivalent, my behaviour would be unchanged, so I would have to communicate that my consciousness had not changed. If, in fact, my consciousness had changed, this means either I would not have noticed, in which case the idea of consciousness loses meaning, or I would have noticed but been unable to communicate it, from which point on my consciousness and my behaviour would become decoupled, implying a type of substance dualism. > -- 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.
