I’m reminded of Dennett’s passage on the color red. Paraphrased:
To judge that you have seen red is to have a complicated visual discrimination process send a simple message to the rest of your brain. There is no movie theater inside the brain that receives this message and then obediently projects a red image on some inner movie screen, just so that your inner homunculus can see it and judge it all over again. Your brain only needs to make the judgment once!
Similarly, if I think I’m conscious, or feel emotion, it’s not like our brain notices and then passes this message “further inside,” to the “real us” (the homunculus). Your brain only has to go into the “angry state” once—it doesn’t have to then send an angry message to the homunculus so that you can really feel anger.
None of them is clear, and the overall structure isn’t clear.
Can you be less conscious than you observe?
Is “changing the parts of me” supposed to be some sort of replacement-by-silicon scenario?
Is an “evaluation” supposed to be a correct evaluation?
Does “has the same evaluations as me” mean “makes the same judgments about itself as I would about myself”?
3 ⇒ 5. Anything that makes the same observations as me is as concious as me.
As per my first question, if an observation is some kind of infallible introspection of your own consciousness, that is true. OTOH, if if it some kind of external behaviour, not necessarily. Even if you reject p-zombies, a silicon replacement is not a p zombie abd could lack consciousness.
No, I would say I can’t be less conscious than I observe.
You didn’ say that. As a premise, it begs the whole question. Or it supposed to be a conclusion?
Sure, replacement by silicon could preserve my evaluations, and therefore my observations
A functional duplicate of yourself would give the same responses to questions, to have the same beliefs, loosely speaking… but it is quite possible for some of those responses to have been rendered false. For instance, your duplicate would initially believe itself to be a real boy made of flesh and bone.
Your duplicate would initially believe itself to be a real boy made of flesh and bone.
Hmm. Yes, I suppose preserving evaluations only always preserves the correctness of those observations which are introspection. Do we have evidence for any components of consciousness that we cannot introspect upon?
To introspect is to observe your evaluations. Since introspection is observation, it is preserved; since it is about your evaluations, its correctness is preserved.
2 was supposed to point out how there shouldn’t be any components to consciousness that we can miss by preserving all the observations, since if there are any such epiphenomenal components of consciousness, there by definition isn’t any evidence of them.
That the reasoning also goes the other way is irrelevant.
That depends on what you mean by observations and evidence. If we preserved the subjective, introspective access to consciousness, then consciousness would be preserved… logically. But we can not do that practically. Practically, we can preserve externally observable functions and behaviour, but we can’t be sure that doing that preserves consciousness.
1. My observations result from evaluations.
2. I have no reason to believe that I am any more conscious than I can observe.
2 ⇒ 3. Changing the parts of me that I cannot observe does not change whether I am conscious.
1, 3 ⇒ 4. Anything that has the same evaluations as me is as conscious as me.
I’m reminded of Dennett’s passage on the color red. Paraphrased:
To judge that you have seen red is to have a complicated visual discrimination process send a simple message to the rest of your brain. There is no movie theater inside the brain that receives this message and then obediently projects a red image on some inner movie screen, just so that your inner homunculus can see it and judge it all over again. Your brain only needs to make the judgment once!
Similarly, if I think I’m conscious, or feel emotion, it’s not like our brain notices and then passes this message “further inside,” to the “real us” (the homunculus). Your brain only has to go into the “angry state” once—it doesn’t have to then send an angry message to the homunculus so that you can really feel anger.
Do you mean outward, behavioural style observation, or introspection.
All of them.
I still don’t see how the conclusion follows.
Let me decompose 1, 3 ⇒ 4 further, then.
3 ⇒ 5. Anything that makes the same observations as me is as concious as me.
1 ⇒ 6. Anything that has the same evaluations as me makes the same observations as me.
5, 6 ⇒ 4.
What step is problematic?
None of them is clear, and the overall structure isn’t clear.
Can you be less conscious than you observe?
Is “changing the parts of me” supposed to be some sort of replacement-by-silicon scenario?
Is an “evaluation” supposed to be a correct evaluation?
Does “has the same evaluations as me” mean “makes the same judgments about itself as I would about myself”?
As per my first question, if an observation is some kind of infallible introspection of your own consciousness, that is true. OTOH, if if it some kind of external behaviour, not necessarily. Even if you reject p-zombies, a silicon replacement is not a p zombie abd could lack consciousness.
No, I would say I can’t be less conscious than I observe.
Sure, replacement by silicon could preserve my evaluations, and therefore my observations.
Evaluations can be wrong in, say, the sense that they produce observations that fail to match reality.
Having the same evaluations implies making the same judgements.
You didn’ say that. As a premise, it begs the whole question. Or it supposed to be a conclusion?
A functional duplicate of yourself would give the same responses to questions, to have the same beliefs, loosely speaking… but it is quite possible for some of those responses to have been rendered false. For instance, your duplicate would initially believe itself to be a real boy made of flesh and bone.
Hmm. Yes, I suppose preserving evaluations only always preserves the correctness of those observations which are introspection. Do we have evidence for any components of consciousness that we cannot introspect upon?
The issue is whether introspection would be retained.
To introspect is to observe your evaluations. Since introspection is observation, it is preserved; since it is about your evaluations, its correctness is preserved.
2 was supposed to point out how there shouldn’t be any components to consciousness that we can miss by preserving all the observations, since if there are any such epiphenomenal components of consciousness, there by definition isn’t any evidence of them.
That the reasoning also goes the other way is irrelevant.
That depends on what you mean by observations and evidence. If we preserved the subjective, introspective access to consciousness, then consciousness would be preserved… logically. But we can not do that practically. Practically, we can preserve externally observable functions and behaviour, but we can’t be sure that doing that preserves consciousness.