- Jacques Mallah, The Partial Brain Thought Experiment: Partial Consciousness and its Implications.The ‘Fading Qualia’ thought experiment of Chalmers purports to show that computationalism is very probably true even if dualism is true by considering a series of brains, with biological parts increasingly substituted for by artificial but functionally analagous parts in small steps, and arguing that consciousness would not plausibly vanish in either a gradual or sudden way. This defense of computationalism inspired an attack on computationalism by Bishop, who argued that a similar series of substitutions by parts that have the (...)
| 2009-03-05 |
Partial brains
|
|
Hello. I would like to know what people think of this paper. It is primarily a defense of computationalism against Bishop's use of the Fading Qualia argument to back his claim that "Counterfactuals Cannot Count". It also constitutes an attack on the Fading Qualia argument in general, and can be taken to support an elimitivist view about qualia.
This short paper grew out of an email exchange which was really about mathematical platonism, in which I argued against the claim that partial brains (which can tend towards nonexistent brains) would have to have the same consciousness as a full brain. I wrote it up as an entry for the Consciousness Online web conference, but it was not chosen. I would also appreciate any suggestions regarding whether and where to submit it for publication. Thanks.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/449
Reply
|
| 2010-06-19 |
Partial brains
Reply to Jacques Mallah |
|
I personally believe that a 'new consciousness' would emerge (that will supersede the prevailing consciousness) once the biological brain-parts are substituted for piece (circuit) by piece. Consciousness would not vanish gradually, but it would be 'replaced' in an incremental (stepwise) way, dictated by statistical, thermal, the weightage of the particular circuit and the interaction of the 'neural consciousness correlates'.
In other words, we would get a qualitative change in consciousness.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/4063
Reply
|
