asaris

You argue that consciousness can't be a pure accident, but its not clear why that's the case. Surely a creature that acted exactly as if it were conscious would be just as good from an evolutionary standpoint as a creature that actually was conscious, right?

I would reject the hypothesis that this position entails what you call "bio-chauvinism". (Nice word, btw.) Certainly it's possible, as far as we know, for a silicon 'brain' to be conscious -- I don't know why it wouldn't be. And I don't understand why you insist that the appearance of consciousness is consciousness. It's certainly possible for a creature to appear to be conscious and not actually be conscious. Of course, we have every epistemic right to believe that such a creature is conscious, but we could still be wrong about it. You might object that, according to the Searlian view, only neurons can produce the emergent property 'consciousness'. But certainly that's not necessarily the case, just like it's not just water molecules that produce wetness.

Finally, you criticize me, and to some extent rightly, for relying too much on common sense. It would be an interesting discussion, though probably one best held in another thread, how to use common sense in philosophy. But I would certainly be remiss if I thought our common sense intutions were an infallible guide to the nature of reality. But likewise, the fact that a theory that does violence to our common sense intutions is a good reason to believe it to be false. If an ethical theory told you that, in fact, killing was okay, that we be a good reason to reject the theory, right? I don't see that's it's all that different in philosophy of mind.

edit: Read Chalmer's essay.

Well, I should start off by saying that, off-hand, I don't have any problems with non-reductive functionalism. It's the various reductionisms that I don't like. And, to repeat, just about the only philosophy of mind I've ever done was reading Searle's book Rediscovery of the Mind, and that was over six years ago.

Two difficulties I can see with his argument. First of all, when he discusses 'suddenly disappearing qualia', he seems to assume that large portions of the phenomenal field disappear at a single time, and this is what gives his example a lot of its plausibility. If you assume small chunks of qualia disappearing, it becomes much more plausible. Imagine, as I sit at my desk, that some evil demon is slowly replacing my neurons with silicon chips. At some point, the pen to my left disappears. But, since I need it to grade some papers, I reach for it, and grasp it. I don't do so consciously, however. Certainly it's possible to grasp something without being conscious of it -- think of the experience where you're holding your glasses, and find yourself wondering where they are. Moreover, other than whatever its apparent plausibility might be, Chalmers gives us no real reason to believe his example is more plausible than SD qualia.

The second difficulty is that Chalmers's objection to 'Dancing Qualia' are based on the assumption that qualia would be inverted within the same phenomenology. That is, when the subject's qualia invert, they're replaced by relevantly similar qualia -- colors with colors, for example. But that's not necessarily, or even probably, the case. To turn back to me becoming a robot. At some point, I don't perceive 'yellow' anymore. Instead, I percieve something that can still be distinguished from red, blue, etc., but is not phenomenologically the same as color. It's not so much, as Chalmers assumes, that I'm perceiving different qualia. It's that I'm perceiving qualia differently. Consider the question "What does the world seem like to a bat?" It's clear, as long as you assume that there is such a thing as what the world seems like to a bat, that it's very, very different from what it seems like to us. It seems to me that this is the sort of thing an inverted qualia person would want to say, and that with this, the plausibility of Chalmers's example disappears.

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