[ExI] Brains, Computers, AI and Uploading

Gordon Swobe gts_2000 at yahoo.com
Mon Jan 25 00:38:28 UTC 2010


--- On Sun, 1/24/10, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> wrote:

> ... the fact, simply obscured by a few centuries of philosophical 
> dualism, that "consciousness" has no really different ontological 
> status, from, say, digestion...

Right, Stefano, except that I think you really mean to say that consciousness has no really different epistemic status from digestion, not that it has no different ontological status. 

I think we can and should consider consciousness reducible epistemically to its neurological substrate, and in this respect we should consider it no different from digestion. When we come to know every possible fact about the brain and nervous system, we will then know everything we can or need know about consciousness. This epistemic reducibility does not however imply ontological reducibility. 

Unlike most things which have a reducible third-person ontology (e.g., mountains, planets, digestive systems) consciousness has an irreducible first-person ontology. It exists in the same one world as those things with third-person ontologies and differs from those things only that one respect. The difference means nothing in particular, though it has caused an enormous amount of philosophical confusion over the centuries.

-gts


      



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