Lee Corbin writes:
[quoting Stathis]
> > I would still say that even if it could somehow
> > be shown that appropriate brain states necessarily lead to conscious
>states,
> > which I suspect is the case, it would still not be clear how this comes
> > about, and it would still not be clear what this is like unless you
> > experience the brain/conscious state yourself, or something like it.
>
>I anticipate that in the future it will, as you say so well,
>be shown that "appropriate brain states necessarily lead to
>conscious states", except I also expect that by then the
>meaning of "conscious states" will be vastly better informed
>and filled-out than today. In particular, the concept will
>have migrated from a mix of 1st and 3rd person notions, to
>entirely 3rd person notions. I speculate that after this
>occurs, people won't consider the old 1st person notion to
>be of much value (after all, you can't really use it to
>communicate with anyone about anything).
I really can't imagine how you could make consciousness entirely a 3rd
person notion, no matter how well it is understood scientifically. Suppose
God, noting our sisyphian debate, takes pity on us and reveals that in fact
consciousness is just a special kind of recursive computation. He then gives
us a dozen lines of C code, explaining that when implemented this
computation is the simplest possible conscious process. OK, from a
scientific point of view, we know *everything* about this piece of code. We
also know that it is conscious, which is normally a 1st person thing,
because God told us. But we *still* don't know what it feels like to *be*
the code implemented on a computer. We might be able to guess, perhaps from
analogy with our own experience, perhaps by running the code in our head;
but once we start doing either of these things, we are replacing the 3rd
person perspective with the 1st person.
--Stathis Papaiuoannou
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Received on Tue May 24 2005 - 23:48:24 PDT