From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wupost!uunet!stanford.edu!Csli!avrom Fri Oct 30 15:17:37 EST 1992
Article 7393 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wupost!uunet!stanford.edu!Csli!avrom
>From: avrom@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Avrom Faderman)
Subject: Re: Simulated Brain
Message-ID: <1992Oct25.232946.25879@Csli.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: amnell@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Marko Amnell)
Organization: Stanford University CSLI
Date: Sun, 25 Oct 1992 23:29:46 GMT
Expires: Sat, 7 Nov 1992 08:00:00 GMT
Lines: 35


In article <1992Oct21.10100.1131@klaava.Helisnki.FI>
amnell@klaava.Helsinki.FI writes:

| you should keep in mind that sensory 
| stimuli and a more or less healthy childhood of interaction with
| fellow human beings went into making you what you are today.  Yes,
| you can take them away afterwards but this does not change the fact 
| that they were instrumental in forming you as a conscious being. I
| think that a child deprived of all sensory stimuli (who 'grew up in
| a barrel' as they say in Finland) would fail to achieve a full, 
| healthy conscious state on par with other people.

This is probably true, but I'm not sure that it really addresses the
issue at hand.  It may be a _psychologically_ necessary fact that
humans need interaction with other people to achieve a full state of 
consciousness, but this doesn't mean that _conceptually_ consciousness
implies a history of interaction.  If an exact duplicate of me,
current brain state included, were suddenly to materialize, I think we
would be acting strangely not to attribute consciousness to it, even
though it has no history of interaction.  We should not confuse
probable _causes_ of consciousness with what constitutes a workable
_definition_. 

       
 
 



-- 
Avrom I. Faderman                  |  "...a sufferer is not one who hands
avrom@csli.stanford.edu            |    you his suffering, that you may 
Stanford University                |    touch it, weigh it, bite it like a
Department of Philosophy and       |    coin..."


