Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> 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.
>
But if you take conscious experience as fundamental there's no other
standard of sameness. It is only because we believe in the
independent reality "out there" that being fooled makes sense. If the
doctor was also creating a simulation of the sky there would be no
sense to saying the sky looks different but we are fooled into
thinking it looks the same.
Brent
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Received on Fri Aug 28 2009 - 10:48:33 PDT