On Monday, October 1, 2012 12:03:38 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: > > On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:46 AM, Craig Weinberg > <whats...@gmail.com<javascript:>> > wrote: > > >> You're not really answering the question. The neural implants are > >> refined to the point where thousands of people are walking around with > >> them with no problem. Any objective or subjective test thrown at them > >> they pass. There are implants available for every part of the brain. > >> You're saying that if someone has 12 implants of the best possible > >> design they will be fine, but when they get 13 they will start to act > >> strangely. > > > > > > They may or may not act strangely depending on who is defining what > strange > > is. Think of how Alzheimers progresses. It's not like dementia can be > > detected from the first appearance of an amyloid plaque overgrowth. > > > > It would really be surprising if any brain change didn't follow this > > pattern. If you ingest n micrograms of LSD you are fine. If you ingest > n+x > > micrograms, then you have a psychedelic experience lasting several > hours. > > The model of the brain that you seem to assume is based on pure > mechanistic > > assumption. It has no grounding in the physiological realities of what > the > > brain actually is as a living organ. > > Physiological realities are mechanistic. Biologists and doctors are > mechanists. Even if you claim that "the whole is greater than the sum > of its parts" that does not mean that if yoyu replace the parts the > whole will stop working. > > >> How can you know that this will happen? > > > > > > Because I understand what makes consciousness different from a machine. > > No, you don't. You claim without any coherent explanation that even an > engineer with godlike abilities could not make a replacement brain > part that would leave the person functioning normally, and that even > if one such part could be made to work surely *two* of them would not! > > >> You're not just > >> saying here that it would be technically difficult, you're saying that > >> it would be *impossible* for the implants to work properly. So what > >> physical law that you know about and no-one else does would be broken? > > > > > > The implants would work like proper implants, not like proper > sub-persons. > > Implants have no experiences, therefore a collection of interconnected > > implants also have no experiences. If you have enough of a living > person's > > brain left to be able to still be a person, then that person can learn > to > > use prosthetic additions and implants to augment functionality or repair > > damage, but not replace the person themselves. > > > > There is no physical law that is broken, there is an assumption of > > equivalence which I am exposing as fallacious. > > But if the implants worked as implants without experiences the person > would behave as if everything were fine while internally and > impotently noticing that his experiences were disappearing or > changing. Do you understand what this means? >
I understand exactly what you think it means, but you don't understand why the theoretical assumption doesn't apply to reality. Where consciousness is concerned, the whole is not merely the sum of its parts, or even greater than the sum of it's parts, it is *other than* the sum of it's parts. If the parts are not genetically identical to the whole, then they cannot be expected to even create a sum, let alone produce an experience which is greater or other than that sum. You assume that personal experience is a sum of impersonal mechanisms, whereas I understand that is not the case at all. Impersonal mechanisms are the public back end of sub-personal experiences. If you try to build a person from mechanisms, you will *always fail*, because the sub-personal experiences are not accessible without the personal experiences to begin with. A baby has to learn to think like an adult through years of personal experience. It is the actual subjective participation in the experiences which drives how the neurology develops. We see this with how people blind from birth use their visual cortex for tactile experience. If you gave the blind person a drug with will make their visual cortex function just like a sighted person's, they still won't get any colors. The colors aren't in 'there', there in 'here'. Craig > > > -- > Stathis Papaioannou > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/uaASEuckHpwJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
