Jason Resch wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 5:45 AM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp.domain.name.hidden
> <mailto:stathisp.domain.name.hidden>> wrote:
>
>
> A variant of Chalmers' "Fading Qualia" argument
> (http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html) can be used to show Alice must
> be conscious.
>
> Alice is sitting her exam, and a part of her brain stops working,
> let's say the part of her occipital cortex which enables visual
> perception of the exam paper. In that case, she would be unable to
> complete the exam due to blindness. But if the neurons in her
> occipital cortex are stimulated by random events such as cosmic rays
> so that they pass on signals to the rest of the brain as they would
> have normally, Alice won't know she's blind: she will believe she sees
> the exam paper, will be able to read it correctly, and will answer the
> questions just as she would have without any neurological or
> electronic problem.
>
> If Alice were replaced by a zombie, no-one else would notice, by
> definition; also, Alice herself wouldn't notice, since a zombie is
> incapable of noticing anything (it just behaves as if it does). But I
> don't see how it is possible that Alice could be *partly* zombified,
> behaving as if she has normal vision, believing she has normal vision,
> and having all the cognitive processes that go along with normal
> vision, while actually lacking any visual experiences at all. That
> isn't consistent with the definition of a philosophical zombie.
>
>
> Stathis,
>
> What you described sounds very similar to a split brain patient I saw on
> a documentary. He was able to respond to images presented to one eye,
> and ended up drawing them with a hand controlled by the other
> hemisphere, yet he had no idea why he drew that image when asked. The
> problem may not be that he isn't experiencing the visualization, but
> that the part of his brain that is responsible for speech is
> disconnected from the part of his brain that can see.
>
> See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo
>
> Jason
I think experiments like this support the idea that consciousness is not a
single thing. We tend to identify conscious thought with the thought that is
reported in speech. But that's just because it is the thought that is readily
accessible to experimenters.
Brent
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Received on Fri Nov 21 2008 - 14:01:47 PST