No, I'm thinking of brain damage and loss of capacity. There are literally hundreds of thousands of such examples. You have heard of Brain damage? Are you familiar with Alzheimer's, hypoxia, stroke? I have a friend who had a stroke and there are many activities the two of us can no longer do. His mental capacities are simply not the same. I'm sure you have heard that physical damage to the brain can render someone with a much lower mental capacity?
My history in this area goes back more than 20 years. I was at first a hardcore AI enthusiast. After years of disappointment and research I gave up on it. I read Searle's Minds, Brains and Science and John Hogan's The Undiscovered Mind and many others. I came to the JREF 5 years ago to make my case that the brain is not simply a computer and explain why the Hard Problem of Consciousness was a real and fundamental problem that could only be solved by a mind that was not simply a computer made of meat.
My arguments, I thought, were good. I used the Chinese room and a number of my own creative devices but in the end I realized that the arguments did not suffice. While I'm very intrigued by HPC and arguments like the Chinese Room I realize that these are simply gaps of human understanding. These are not theories or answers to anything. Since the dawn of enlightenment humans have had gaps in their understanding of the natural world and they have been filling those gaps with all sorts of ideas, many metaphysical. The gaps have been shrinking. There's not much left anymore. The "mind" is one of the last great discoveries. I don't doubt that we will solve it.
There are not a lot of options. There's Materialism, Dualism, Pluralism, Monism.
You tell me.
Brain damage causes a loss of function, even to the point of death. At no point does it render a human being a non-subject or a non-person, until that person dies. A person might not be able even to speak or to move or to blink intentionally while in a coma, but those who emerge sometimes report that they were fully awake and fully aware - of conversations that occurred, for example. There is no empirical way to determine this circumstance, but even if it were it would simply mean that there are discernible differences in the brain between someone who is awake in this way. The brain is a "sine qua non" of human functioning, it is by no means a complete explanation for what a human being is or does.
Yes, I have been thinking about and pursuing the HPC for as many years. I am convinced that consciousness is irreducible to material causes.
First off, the materialist explanation for human intellection is a reduction ad absurdum: it is "the thought that ends all thought". If our thoughts are the result of material forces, then thought is meaningless and the very idea of truth is illusory. If my personal acceptance of the apparent truth of "modus ponens" reasoning, for example, is due to the fact that one protein fits another in a certain way... then the whole enterprise of logic is simply stupid and illusory. If our thoughts are a mechanical process, then they are no more true than marbles rolling down a hill.
The argument of the reducing gap is a fallacy. For some beautiful prose about how tempting and how wrong this fallacy is, check out the first paragraph of Chesterton's <A href="http://[url="http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/orthodoxy/ch6.html" target=_blank>Orthodoxy Chapter six here[/url].
There are arguments for and against everything and anything. The arguments against materialist reductionism are overwhelming. The arguments in favour are weak. MR amounts to a "presumed working hypothesis".
By dualism, I thought you were referring to the human person, not to theories about the possible ways of being. I do not think I am a strict dualist about human beings, because I believe in the fundamental unity, "oneness", of a human being.
