On 3/25/2018 2:15 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 21 Mar 2018, at 22:56, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 3/21/2018 2:27 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Thu, 22 Mar 2018 at 5:45 am, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 3/20/2018 11:29 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Wed, 21 Mar 2018 at 9:03 am, Brent Meeker
<[email protected] <mailto:[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] <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?
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?
I think it would, because I don’t think there are isolated
consciousness modules in the brain. A large enough change in visual
experience will be noticed by the subject, who will report that
things look different. This could only happen if there is a change
in the input to the language system from the visual system; but we
have assumed that the output from the visual system is the same, and
only the consciousness has changed, leading to a contradiction.
But what about internal systems which are independent of
perception...the very reason Bruno wants to talk about dream states.
And I'm not necessarily asking that behavior be identical...just that
the body/brain interface be the same. The "brain" may be different
in how it processes input from the eyeballs and hence report verbally
different perceptions. In other words, I'm wondering how much does
computationalism constrain consciousness. My intuition is that there
could be a lot of difference in consciousness depending on how
different perceptual inputs are process and/or merged and how
internal simulations are handled. To take a crude example, would it
matter if the computer-brain was programmed in a functional language
like LISP, an object-oriented language like Ruby, or a neural
network? Of course Church-Turing says they all compute the same set
of functions, but they don't do it the same way
They can do it in the same way. They will not do it in the same way
with a compiler, but will do it in the same way when you implement an
interpreter in another interpreter. The extensional CT (in terms if
which functions are calculated) entails the intensional CT (in terms
of which computations can be processed. Babbage machine could emulate
a quantum brain. It involves a relative slow-down, but the subject
will not notice without external clues. In arithmetic, all possible
sorts of computers are implemented infinitely often, with some special
redundancy which plays a role in the computations statistics, the
first person statistics and the origin of the physical appearances.
You retreat into what is possible. My question is much more directly
pragmatic. If I actually made a silicon based replacement for your
brain that had the same input/output would you consciousness be
different if the replacement processed the information differently...and
how could you or we know?
Brent
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