On 3/25/2018 7:14 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 26 March 2018 at 04:57, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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?
I have made the argument that your consciousness would not be
different if the replacement processed the information differently
provided that the I/O behaviour at the interface with the neural
tissue was the same. This follows from consideration of what it means
to be conscious, which we can do even if we can't verify or even
define consciousness. If consciousness were changed but the outputs to
the rest of the brain unchanged, the subject would either not notice
any change (and what significance could consciousness have if a an
arbitrarily large change in it would go unnoticed) or, if he did
notice a change, it could not be communicated and there would be a
decoupling between consciousness and behaviour from that point on.
Well he might not notice the change because he can't remember how it was
before the substitution (maybe it's memory and recall processes that
were changed) and so the change /could be/ communicated...if it were
noticed, but it isn't.
It seems to me there's something fishy about making behavior and
conscious thought functionally equivalent so neither can change without
a corresponding change in the other. My intuition is that there is a
lot of my thinking that doesn't show up as observable behavior. No
doubt it's observable at the micro-level in my brain; but not at the
external level.
Brent
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Stathis Papaioannou
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