On 3/20/2018 11:29 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Wed, 21 Mar 2018 at 9:03 am, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
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?
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,
I agree with that. But you've already supposed that functional
equivalence at the behavior level implies preservation of
consciousness. So what I'm considering is replacements in the brain far
above the neuron level, say at the level of whole functional groups of
the brain, e.g. the visual system, the auditory system, the memory,...
Would functional equivalence at the body/brain interface then still
imply consciousness equivalence?
Brent
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
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