On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 01:23:20PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > A stroke results in objective and subjective changes, such as the inability > to move a limb, understand language or see. These are gross examples of > "fading qualia". What you are proposing, as I understand it, is that if the > damaged brain is replaced neuron by neuron, function and qualia would be > restored, but at a certain point when you installed the artificial neuron, > the patient would suddenly lose all consciousness, although to an outside > observer he would seem to be continuing to improve. >
Rather than focus on the term "fading qualia", to which we seem to have derived a different understanding from the same paper, what you're saying is that a stroke victim can suffer diminished qualia, ie qualia no longer existing where once there was some. Eg no longer being able to smell a banana, or gone colour blind, or similar. That same person may or may not be aware of the fact that they've lost their qualia. The we can consider a nonfunctionalist response to the experiment where neurons are replaced by functionally equivalent artificial replacements. A nonfunctionalist ought to treat this like the stroke case - at some point qualia will disappear. If the person notices the qualia disappearing, the functionalist would simply say that the replacement parts are not functionally equivalent, or that the subsitution level was wrong. This is not an interesting case. A partial zombie, by defintion will always report that the full qualia were present, just as a full zombie would. If, however, the person fails to notice the disappearing qualia, a functionalist would say that the full set of qualia was being experienced, whereas a nonfunctionalist would say that the person might be experiencing a reduced set of qualia, even though e reports all er faculties being sound. Is this absurd? - no more absurd than the notion of a full zombie, I would say. But quales, as continua, which I took to be Chalmers' absurdity, simply are not implied. Quales exist discretely. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
