On Nov 21, 2008, at 3:45 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> A variant of Chalmers' "Fading Qualia" argument
> (http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html) can be used to show Alice must
> be conscious.
The same argument can be used to show that Empty-Headed Alice must
also be conscious. (Empty-Headed Alice is the version where only
Alice's motor neurons are stimulated by cosmic rays, while all of the
other neurons in Alice's head do nothing. Alice's body continues to
act indistinguishably from the way it would have acted, but there's
nothing going on in the rest of Alice's brain, random or otherwise.
Telmo and Bruno have both indicated that they don't think this Alice
is conscious. Or at least, that a mechanist-materialist shouldn't
believe that this Alice is conscious.)
Let's assume that Lucky Alice is conscious. Every neuron in her head
(they're all artificial) has become causally disconnected from all the
others, but they (very improbably) continue to do exactly what they
would have done when they were connected, due to cosmic rays. Let's
say that we remove one of the neurons from Alice's head. This has no
effect on her outward behavior, or on the behavior of any of her other
neurons (since they're already causally disconnected). Of course, we
can remove two neurons, and then three, etc. We can remove her entire
visual cortex. This can't have any noticeable effect on her
consciousness, because the neurons that do remain go right on acting
the way they would have acted if the cortex was there. Eventually, we
can remove every neuron that isn't a motor neuron, so that we have an
empty-headed Alice whose body takes the exam, ducks when I throw the
ball at her head, etc.
If Lucky Alice is conscious and Empty-Headed Alice is not conscious,
then there are partial zombies halfway between them. Like you, I can't
make any sense of these partial zombies. But I also can't make any
sense of the idea that Empty-Headed Alice is conscious. Therefore, I
don't think this argument shows that Empty-Headed Alice (and by
extension, Lucky Alice) must be conscious. I think it shows that
there's a deeper problem - probably with one of our assumptions.
Even though I actually think that mechanist-materialists should view
both Lucky Alice and Empty-Headed Alice as not conscious, I still
think they have to deal with this problem. They have to deal with the
spectrum of intermediate states between Fully-Functional Alice and
Lucky Alice. (Or between Fully-Functional Alice and Empty-Headed Alice.)
-- Kory
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list.domain.name.hidden
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe.domain.name.hidden
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
Received on Fri Nov 21 2008 - 08:54:21 PST