RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...

From: Lee Corbin <lcorbin.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 00:07:16 -0700

Stathis writes

> I was using the term "information" loosely, to include what is commonly
> termed qualia, subjective experience etc. I agree that if a physical system
> is fully specified, then that is all you need in order to duplicate or
> emulate the system. The new system will do everything the original one did,
> including have conscious experiences. It's worth stressing this point again:
> you don't need any special, non-physical information to emulate or duplicate
> a conscious system; you don't need God to provide it with a soul, you don't
> need to purchase a mind-body interface kit, you don't need to meditate and
> wave quartz crystals around, and you don't need to have 1st person knowledge
> of its subjective experiences. All you need is a few kilograms of raw
> materials, a molecular assembler mechanism, and the data which indicates
> where each bit goes. Once the job is finished, you automatically have a
> system which talks, eats, and is conscious. Psychology and biology have been
> reduced to physics and chemistry. Consciousness has been shown to be just be
> an emergent phenomenon in a particular type of biological computer. Agree so
> far?

Well, this is certainly all right by me---though hardly by everyone
here. You have described very well the ordinary reduction of humans
and animals to ordinary physical mechanisms, a view that was
widespread among materialists all through the 19th and 20th
centuries, even if they didn't have as much evidence as we do.

> OK: having said all that, and assuming at this point that we know the
> position and function of every atom in this newly created system, I *still*
> would wonder what it feels like to actually *be* this system.

Have you read Hofstadter's comments on Thomas Nagel's essay "What is
it Like to be a Bat?". (Most easily accessed in "The Mind's I" by
Hofstadter and Dennett.) And I presume that you're familiar with
Daniel Dennett's views on qualia, as in "Consciousness Explained",
but that you reject them? (I'm rather new to this list.)

Lee
Received on Wed May 18 2005 - 03:12:15 PDT