So now that you have both excluded neurons as a requirement for consciousness, what has neuroscience to do with consciousness again?
Actually, I'm happy excluding neurons as a
requirement for consciousness under exactly the same terms that I exclude bricks as a
requirement for houses. I don't think my house has a single structural brick in it (although I admit there are some decorative faux-brick facades along some interior walls). But I still think of it as a house. Apparently we can build houses out of brick or out of wood. I've even seen instances of houses being build entirely of metal, of mud, or of sod.
And depending upon where you go, you may or may not see all those types of houses. If you live in the American Southwest -- especially if you lived there two hundred years ago -- you might not have seen a single wood building in your life.
So what does the study of bricks have to do with houses, again, if we can build houses entirely out of something other than brick? Well, bricks have properties, you see. They have things like solidity and tensile strength and compressive strength and insulation and thermal mass and all the rest of the things that structural engineers study. So by studying the properties of bricks, structural engineers can learn how to build houses out of other things. Wood, for example, has some pretty good structural properties -- in fact, it's got better shear strength than brick -- so maybe we could use the compressive strength of wood to build a house where the walls were made entirely of wood instead of brick.
!Kaggan and westprog are in the position of a Hopi Indian denying that houses can be made of wood, because all the houses he's ever seen have been made of mud. Because all the conscious systems that we've seen involve neurons, therefore consciousness
must be made of neurons. The fact that neuroscientists have analyzed neurons pretty thoroughly and have identified lots of properties that we can duplicate in a non-neural framework is irrelevant, just as it's irrelevant to our not-very-bright Hopi that things other than mud bricks can have compressive strength. Because houses must be made of mud brick, darn it!
And somewhere there's a not very bright Finn or Swede out there insisting that houses must be made of wood, and somewhere there's a not very bright American living in a trailer park insisting that houses must be made out of sheet aluminum. What ties all of these people together is an inability to recognize the validity of abstract properties.
