🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep11.225949.10095@sco.com> evanh@sco.COM (Evan Hunt) writes:

>I would, at least, deny that it's *obviously* true.  Consider:  If dualism
>is false, then mind cannot be separated from matter; therefore, an object
>which lacks consciousness, no matter how much it looks like you, cannot
>be a complete replica of you.  If consciousness is a dynamic, ongoing
>chemical reaction in your brain, an event rather than a substance, then
>that reaction is a part of your physical structure.  A replica would have
>to include it, and so the replica would therefore possess consciousness
>as well.

OK, and your assertion comes down to "if physicalism is true, then
it's logically necessary that my replica would be conscious".  But
are there any grounds to believe the consequent, apart from prior
faith in physicalism?  I don't doubt that consciousness arises from
dynamic chemical reactions in the brain, but how on earth could
it be logically necessitated by such processes?  On the face of it,
it seems to be a further fact.  I need just a hint of how such an
entailment might go.

Note the disanalogy with things like life.  The aliveness of a system
is entailed by the physical facts about it: the facts about life that
need explaining consist in third-person facts about reproduction,
adaptation, metabolism, and so on, all of which are clearly functional
concepts.  So, as long as the physical gunk is playing the right sorts
of causal role, there's no logical gap there.  Even for cognitive
concepts like learning, the main facts that need explaining are
things like how behaviour improves over time in response to environmental
stimulation, and such facts are obviously entailed by the right kind
of physical/functional story.  Not so with consciousness: even when
you've told the whole story about behaviour and its physical causation,
there still seems to be a vast explanatory gap between that and
the phenomenon of consciousness itself.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."