From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Mon Jun 21 1999 - 14:26:17 MDT
> I see no part of this scenario that makes me feel that the dismantled brain
> is any more alive than any other dead brain. Basically, people are
> pretending that the dead brain is still alive, and they have divided up that
> dead brain's functions among a lot of people, each who do the function for
> the dead brain and give the dead brain credit. Put all these things
> together, and it looks like the dead brain is really functioning.
So to continue this thought experiment, suppose that after your
roomful of living engineers have used their memories of the once-
live brain to contruct a robot ("dead brain") that exhibits all
its apparently conscious behaviors, after which a virus wipes
them all out. Are those apparently conscious behaviors of the
surviving robot going to go away, or do they no longer qualify
as conscious simply because no conscious-by-definition human is
around to judge? Suppose that robot then uses its knowledge to
construct a human genome from recordings, mechanically generates
DNA from it, implants it into a cow egg and grows a new human.
Where, then, does that person's consciousness come from, if it is
not simply a consequence of the biochemical activity of the meat
machine?
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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