From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Dec 13 1999 - 12:42:08 MST
At 11:43 PM 11/12/99 -0500, Dan wrote:
>You could be "thinking" (in the functional sense) but not
>Thinking in the spooky sense. How do you Know that you're Thinking when
>you could just "think" that you're Thinking?
>
>This is not an idle skeptical concern. I really DON'T think that you're
>Thinking. I think that you're "thinking."
Uh huh.
Under a certain pressure from empirical investigation, I think, `think' and
Think that this sort of distinction just folds up.
For example: I had never experienced the qualia of seeing a 3D world as
most of you do. I get by, using complex learned inferences from size cues,
colour density changes, parallax, etc, but one of my eyes can't do the
central focus thing and so the neural visual areas that were meant to
decode its input and correlate them with the other eye's slightly offset
field have been colonised by my emergent science fiction lobe (or withered
away, or whatever). So I inhabit, by contrast with most humans, a
qualia-deficient reality. In some ways, I suspect, this is weirder than
total blindness, since I have quite a good idea of what it might be like to
see a richly rounded world, but I just can't do it. (Interestingly Dave
Chalmers had a similar dysopsia that was corrected late in childhood and he
recovered depth vision, which is perhaps one reason for his interest in the
mystery of qualia.)
But I know that if stem cells were injected into my brain, and tweaked just
right to grow back some relevant cortex, and I was trained to use it, it's
possible that depth would abruptly `pop out' for me. I'd have new qualia
that are inconceivable to me right now, strictly speaking. Does that make
me a partial zombie? Not. (But then I'd say that, wouldn't I? Throw stones
at the zombie, he can't duck!)
Damien Z. Broderick
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