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Article 2443 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Ignore Searle and be happier
Message-ID: <1991Dec30.185605.23355@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 30 Dec 91 18:56:05 GMT
References: <61068@netnews.upenn.edu> <1991Dec28.222433.17716@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <61172@netnews.upenn.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
Lines: 43

In article <61172@netnews.upenn.edu> weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener) writes:

>That is, Searle was willing to accept such computability assumptions for the
>sake of refuting SOMEONE ELSE'S argument who made just such an assumption.
>It was never part of his own.

Precisely.  Searle claims to have no opinion one way or the other about
computability, but recognizes that the issue is orthogonal to his own
argument.

>Anyway, you seem to have accepted my categorization of your argument as a
>reformatting of the brain simulator reply as the paradox of the heap.  If
>so, your argument accomplishes absolutely nothing--on general principles.
>For Searle is not claiming to have solved the paradox of the heap, and you
>are not allowed to demand that he does so as part of his argument.  It is a
>known puzzler, that grain-by-grain eventually leads to a holistic heap, and
>somehow we deal with this without screaming "contradiction! contradiction!"
>Yet you'd have us do that with your neuron-by-neuron replacement.  No dice.

No, there's more going on here than the trivial Sorites paradox.  As a
rule the Sorites (heap) paradox is no deep paradox at all, just a
semantic puzzle.  The reason being, of course, that most properties,
e.g. "is a heap", "is tall", etc, are not black-or-white two-valued
predicates, but are capable of gradually fading away over a continuum
of cases.  My point, if you read the original post, is that it seems
implausible that consciousness is such a property.  To be more precise:
it's reasonable for consciousness to gradually fade if we allow a
functional state to vary with it (e.g. going to sleep, or moving down
the evolutionary chain), but the idea of a "half-conscious" mental
state while in a fully functionally-aware state seems less reasonable.

i.e. consciousness, unlike heapiness and tallness, seems to be a
Sorites-resistant property.  To argue that this is a common-or-garden
Sorites case would be to accept the possibility of "fading qualia",
as I outlined in my original post.  Now, you can do this if you like,
but the whole point of the argument is that the possibility of fading
qualia, on the face of it, seems much less plausible than that of
fading heapiness.

-- 
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."


