2009/8/28 Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>:
>>> Is your experience the same? Do you experience "frabjous"? If you
>>> put "melody" for "frabjous", you've got synsathesia. I'd say that
>>> functional equivalence is relative to the level. At *some* level
>>> equal-input-output=>equal-experience, but not at higher levels.
>>
>> If you have a different experience for the same input, then you don't
>> produce the same output.
>
> If you count experience as "output" that would reduce functionalism to
> a meaningless tautology.
The private experience itself is not output, but the behaviour it
*might* result in is. If my experience is different, then I might say
that I feel different; hence my behaviour might be different. But if I
am truly functionally identical following a brain transplant, I will
by definition be physically incapable of behaving differently.
>>You might on a particular occasion, but you
>> won't under all conditions, because you will be able to say there is
>> something different about the altered experience; namely, the sky now
>> looks frabjous or melodious as well as blue. To have a functionally
>> perfect brain replacement is to be guaranteed that *nothing* will
>> change, so that you will never even be able to say, "this feels a bit
>> weird, but I can't explain exactly how".
>
> But if functionalism is to be meaningful the level of functional units
> for a perfect brain replacement must not vary with experience -
> otherwise functionalism threatens to collapse to identicalism (I just
> made that up :-) ).
>
>
> I actually expect that our consciousness is very crude, compared to
> the information theoretic content of our perception and our biological
> function, and we could be easily fooled by the doctor. Suppose we get
> a brain that makes the sky look different - but one that forgets how
> the sky used to look.
Yes, you're right. But I'd pay more to keep everything just the same.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Fri Aug 28 2009 - 23:03:44 PDT