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Originally posted by asaris
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.
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But would you be aware that your consciousness is disappearing? Woudln't it scare you at all? Wouldn't you want to exclaim "Dave, my mind is going"?
If so, then consciousness has a functional element
if not, then why not?
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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.
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But that is exactly the point. It is a thought experiment based on this premise.
We start out with the assumption that functional description is not suffient to describe phenomenological experiences.
From this we conclude that we could build one machine that experiences the color of blood as red, and another machine, entirely functionally equivalent that experiences blood as yellow. It is one of the starting assumptions of the reductio-ad-absurdum thought experiment.
Chalmers argues that this assumption leads to absurdities (similar to the above), and hence we should reject our starting assumption, and come to the conclusion that functional identity is enough to ensure phenomenological identity.
An almost identical argument could be made for your new assuption.
You claim that functional isomorphism does not imply even a phenomenologically similar experience, not just a varied experience (you experience blood as 'loud' instead of red). The same reductio-ad-absurdum argument seems to apply here? I cannot see why it wouldn't.
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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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I'm sorry, I don't follow this argument at all.