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Originally Posted by Van Rijn
I think first there would need to be a specific and objectively testable definition of "consciousness." Within the confines of whatever definition you picked, there could be valid thought experiments.
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Well, that's what the philosophers get to argue about. According to how they think consciousness works, the "zombie" concept works or doesn't work.
I think I'm with Dennett on philosophers' zombies. He describes our reaction to them as "accepting the zombic hunch": we
think we can imagine such an entity, but when we get down to thinking about the imaginary details, it all gets a bit light and hazy.
Susan Blackmore's book,
Conversations on Consciousness, is replete with examples of people getting themselves in a mental pickle over the concept of zombies.
For the purposes of
Joe Durnavich's discussion, though, the validity or otherwise of the zombie thought experiment isn't particularly relevant. If we can entertain Dennett's zombic hunch, and examine our reactions to the concept, we can decide what we think about people who show the behaviour of empathy without empathy taking place in their heads. Likewise those who behave lovingly without experiencing love, behave angrily without experiencing anger, or evince sadness without feeling sad.
A lot of people find that rather disturbing. The case of Harold Shipman, the British doctor who killed an unknown number of patients, points up that feeling: he was widely regarded as an empathic and caring doctor, and then it turned out he'd been murdering patients for their money. There was revulsion because of the violation of trust, for sure, but the
simulation of caring was another feature that people had trouble dealing with.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Van Rijn
My question then is: Are fMRI results supposed to be part of a specific definition of consciousness? For example, if there is an electronic device instead of a conventional biological brain, are you going to say that it automatically fails the definition?
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No, there's no functional neural definition of consciousness, apart from to say that a complete absence of activity in a biological brain is not compatible with consciousness, or indeed life.
I personally think we're starting to tease out aspects of consciousness from fMRI and other fast scanning techniques, but that's just a hopeful seeking towards some final understanding of consciousness, not any kind of definition.
With regard to electronic devices, I'm utterly agnostic. If we don't know how brains do "it", I wouldn't care to make any statements about how electronics might do it.
Grant Hutchison