Abram,
On 29 Nov 2008, at 04:49, Abram Demski wrote:
>
> Bruno,
>
> I have done some thinking, and decided that I don't think this last
> step of the argument works for me. You provided two arguments, and so
> I provide two refutations.
>
> 1. (argument by removal of unnecessary parts): Suppose Alice lives in
> a cave all her life, with bread and water tossed down keeping her
> alive, but nobody ever checking to see that she eats it; to the
> outside world, she is functionally unnecessary. But from Alice's point
> of view, she is not functionally removable, nor are the other things
> in the cave that the outside world knows nothing about. The point is,
> we need to be careful about labeling things functionally removable; we
> need to ask "from whose perspective?". A believer in MAT who accepted
> the consciousness of the movie could claim that such an error is being
> made.
The argument was more of the type : "removal of unnecessay and
unconscious or unintelligent parts. Those parts have just no
perspective. If they have some perpective playing arole in Alice's
consciousness, it would mean we have not well chosen the substitution
level. You are reintroducing some consciousness on the elementary
parts, here, I think.
>
>
> 2. (argument by spreading movie in space instead of time): Here I need
> to go back further in the argument... I still think the objection
> about hypotheticals (ie counterfactuals) works just fine. :)
Then you think that if someone is conscious with some brain, which for
some reason, does never use some neurons, could loose consciousness
when that never used neuron is removed?
If that were true, how could still be confident with an artificial
digital brain. You may be right, but the MEC hypothesis would be put
in doubt.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Sat Nov 29 2008 - 03:46:03 PST