From: Harvey Newstrom (newstrom@newstaffinc.com)
Date: Mon Jun 21 1999 - 15:52:15 MDT
On Monday, June 21, 1999 4:26 pm, Lee Daniel Crocker
mailto:lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net wrote:
> 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?
Not at all. It seems obvious to me that the robot functions independently
and can trigger its bits and store memory without the engineers. It is
obviously conscious to some degree. The disembodied neurons in your
previous example cannot trigger its bits and store memory without the
engineers. It is obviously an inanimate object.
> 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?
It does indeed come from the biochemical activity of the meat machine.
However, you have dismantled the meat machine in your previous example.
Even though all its parts are still available, they are no longer
functioning together as a system. Machines stop functioning when they are
dismantled. This disembodied "brain" cannot answer questions or hold
secrets separate from the engineers. Any thought or function you ascribe to
it must first be performed by the engineers and then "credited" to the
disembodied brain.
-- Harvey Newstrom <mailto://newstrom@newstaffinc.com> <http://newstaffinc.com> Author, Consultant, Engineer, Legal Hacker, Researcher, Scientist.
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