The hard problem of consciousness

[Nick227]

What about you (tu quoque alert) ? You seem to think that your "awareness" or "consciousness" will be magically transfered to the new host, but that it wouldn't if the old host didn't die simultaneously. I think you have to admit that your position is suspect.

HI Belz,

What actually is there that needs transferring? All that is experienced (apparently experienced) is a result of the body's replicable processes interacting with their environment. No magic is needed because imo there is nothing magical about awareness or consciousness.

Nick

 

[Nick227]

It seems that language breaks down before we get to the nitty gritty about this issue. Eventually nouns have to be abandoned, but then it gets awfully difficult to communicate in a meaningful way.

Surely the “I” who’s experiencing is a process too, depending on other processes, and creating other processes etc. How else could that which we call “I” come to be if not by constructing it by the process we call thinking?

So, from an experiential perspective, the question seems to be: Is the “I” anything more that a particular but persistent thinking process? (Or a ‘thought’ if one prefers to use a noun).

The "I" is a thinking process, yes. I like Dennett's notion of I being a "centre of narrative gravity." He seems to hold pretty firm to the behaviourist notion of it being entirely the legitimate and necessary result of neurological and social processing, which is fair enough. Though, as you seem to me to intimate above, there is another path which could be taken. For if one considers "I" (and other aspects of selfhood) as simply the result of neurological function, as the materialist perspective imo certainly does, then to me this can lead to the question - is materialism itself really valid without this neurological process? Does it survive? Without this ability to divide my phenomenological world into I/not I and my/not my, what becomes of objectivity? And if objectivity struggles without this neurological function, then does tlop really survive? Does materialism itself continue to hold water? It seems kind of odd that a whole worldview should seem to rely on a couple of neurological processes to have legitimacy, but I can't seem to conclude other than that this is so.

Nick

 

[Nick227]

Dumb question--I thought of this while observing a particular individual on 7th Avenue in New York City two days ago.... If I were to replicate her in Susan Blackmore's machine, would she still have the same boobs? The same cheekbones? The same lips? None of them are purely human--in the case of some of her parts, there is more silicone than there is flesh. Does she come out of the machine as a double-D, or as an A?

(This may seem flippant, but it is actually very key to the argument. Blackmore's machine, de facto, defines the human being as what is replicated. It is a bit of a cheat, to claim that X matters and Y does not, but I will, for present purposes, give her that. I argue that this momentary replication is no more "the person" than any given frame of a movie is "the movie"; there is no meaningful "storage" of the earlier frames of the movie in any frame, nor any necessary connection to the later scenes.)

If you argue that "this momentary replication is no more the person than any given frame of a movie", then fair enough. But then there is nothing that could be captured that is the person. As I see it, assuming the machine functions correctly, then personB is a completely legitimate trajectory in space and time of personA. In fact if it is personA's intention to travel in this way then I would say that personB is in some ways a more legitimate trajectory of personA than personA would be in the event that he or she survives the teleporter through malfunction. Before you ask, this doesn't mean I'm advocating killing them!

Nick