On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 5:21 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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. And if that were the case you would get a person who would behave as if everything were fine while internally and impotently noticing that his experiences were disappearing or changing. Do you understand why he would behave as if everything were fine? Do you understand why he would internally and impotently notice that his experiences were disappearing or changing? > 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'. The problem with someone blind from birth who later has an optical problem corrected in adulthood is that the visual cortex has not developed properly, since this normally happens in infancy. Thus to make them see you would need not only to correct the optical problem but to rewire their brain. If you could do that then they would have all the required apparatus for visual perception and they would be able to see. This is trivially obvious to me and most people: you can't see because your brain doesn't work, and if you fixed the brain you would be able to see. But I'm guessing that you might say that even if the blind person's eyes and brain were fixed, so that everything seemed to work perfectly well, they would still be blind, because the non-mechanistic non-reducible spirit of visual essence would be missing. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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.
