From: *Stathis Papaioannou* <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
On Thu, 22 Mar 2018 at 9:02 am, Bruce Kellett <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:From: *Stathis Papaioannou* <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>On Wed, 21 Mar 2018 at 10:56 am, Bruce Kellett <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: From: *Stathis Papaioannou* <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>On Tue, 20 Mar 2018 at 10:09 am, Bruce Kellett <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: If the theory is that if the observable behaviour of the brain is replicated, then consciousness will also be replicated, then the clear corollary is that consciousness can be inferred from observable behaviour. Which implies that I can be as certain of the consciousness of other people as I am of my own. This seems to do some violence to the 1p/1pp/3p distinctions that computationalism rely on so much: only 1p is "certainly certain". But if I can reliably infer consciousness in others, then other things can be as certain as 1p experiences.... You can’t reliable infer consciousness in others. What you can infer is that whatever consciousness an entity has, it will be preserved if functionally identical substitutions in its brain are made.You have that backwards. You can infer consciousness in others, by observing their behaviour. The alternative would be solipsism. Now, while you can't prove or disprove solipsism in a mathematical sense, you can reject solipsism as a useless theory, since it tells you nothing about anything. Whereas science acts on the available evidence -- observations of behaviour in this case. But we have no evidence that consciousness would be preserved under functionally identical substitutions in the brain. Consciousness may be a global affair, so functionally equivalence may not be achievable, or even definable, within the context of a conscious brain. Can you map the functionality of even a single neuron? You are assuming that you can, but if that function is global, then you probably can't. There is a fair amount of glibness in your assumption that consciousness will be preserved under such substitutions.You can’t know if a mouse is conscious, but you can know that if mouse neurones are replaced with functionally identical electronic neurones its behaviour will be the same and any consciousness it may have will also be the same.You cannot know this without actually doing the substitution and observing the results. So do you think that it is possible to replace the neurones with functionally identical neurones (same output for same input) and the mouse’s behaviour would *not* be the same?Individual neurons may not be the appropriate functional unit. It seems that you might be close to circularity -- neural functionality includes consciousness. So if I maintain neural functionality, I will maintain consciousness.The only assumption is that the brain is somehow responsible for consciousness. The argument I am making is that if any part of the brain is replaced with a functionally identical non-biological part, engineered to replicate its interactions with the surrounding tissue, consciousness will also necessarily be replicated; for if not, an absurd situation would result, whereby consciousness can radically change but the subject not notice, or consciousness decouple completely from behaviour, or consciousness flip on or off with the change of one subatomic particle.
There still seems to be some circularity there -- consciousness is part of the functionality of the brain, or parts thereof, so maintaining functionality requires maintenance of consciousness. One would really need some independent measure of functionality, independent of consciousness. And the claim would be that reproducing local functionality would maintain consciousness. I do not see that that could readily be tested, since mapping all the inputs and outputs of neurons or other brain components may not be technically possible. One could map neuron behaviour at some crude level, but would that be sufficient to maintain consciousness? Natural cell death, and the death of neurons does, generally, lead to noticeable changes in consciousness and function -- have you not noticed decline in memory and other mental faculties as you get older? When consciousness changes in this way, the subject is usually only too painfully aware of the decline in mental acuity. To avoid this effect, characteristic of cell death, one is largely forced to define the reproduction of functionality in terms including maintenance of consciousness (and behaviour) -- hence the circularity.
Bruce -- 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.
