[ExI] The relevance of glutamate in color experience

[Jason Resch]

I am curious if Brent was familiar with this passage from David Chalmer's
"The Conscious Mind" (pages 267-268), which concern the plausibility of
different qualia arising between two functional isomorphs made of different
physical materials (e.g. silicon chips vs. neurons), and if so, what does
this thought experiment imply for the role of molecules in the emergence of
distinct quale?

“For the purposes of the illustration, let these systems be me and Bill.
Where I have a red experience, Bill has a slightly different experience. We
may as well suppose that Bill sees blue; perhaps his experience will be
more similar to mine than that, but it makes no difference to the argument.
The two systems are also different in that where there are neurons in some
small region of my brain, there are silicon chips in Bill’s brain. This
substitution of a silicon circuit for a neural circuit is the only physical
difference between Bill and me.


The crucial step in the thought experiment is to take a silicon circuit
just like Bill’s and install it in my own head as a backup circuit. This
circuit will be functionally isomorphic to a circuit already present in my
head. We equip the circuit with transducers and effectors so that it can
interact with the rest of my brain, but we do not hook it up directly.
Instead, we install a switch that can switch directly between the neural
and silicon circuits. Upon flipping the switch, the neural circuit becomes
irrelevant and the silicon circuit takes over. We can imagine that the
switch controls the points of interface where the relevant circuits affect
the rest of the brain. When it is switched, the connections from the neural
circuit are pushed out of the way, and the silicon circuit's effectors are
attached. (We can imagine that the transducers for both circuits are
attached the entire time, so that the state of both circuits evolves
appropriately, but so that only one circuit at a time is involved in the
processing. We could also run a similar experiment where both transducers
and effectors are disconnected, to ensure that the backup circuit is
entirely isolated from the rest of the system. This would change a few
details, but the moral would be the same.)


Immediately after flipping the switch, processing that was once performed
by the neural circuit is now performed by the silicon circuit. The flow of
control within the system has been redirected. However, my functional
organization is exactly the same as it would have been if we had not
flipped the switch. The only relevant difference between the two cases is
the physical makeup of one circuit within the system. There is also a
difference in the physical makeup of another “dangling” circuit, but this
is irrelevant to the functional organization, as it plays no role in
affecting other components of the system and directing behavior.


What happens to my experience when we flip the switch? Before installing
the circuit, I was experiencing red. After we install it but before we flip
the switch, I will presumably still be experiencing red, as the only
difference is the addition of a circuit that is not involved in processing
in any way; for all the relevance it has to my processing, I might as well
have eaten it. After flipping the switch, however, I am more or less the
same person as Bill. The only difference between Bill and me now is that I
have a causally irrelevant neural circuit dangling from the system (we
might even imagine the circuit is destroyed when the switch is flipped).
Bull, by hypothesis, was enjoying a blue experience. After the switch,
then, I will have a blue experience too.


What will happen, then, is that my experience will change “before my eyes.”
Where I was once experiencing red, I will now experience blue. All of a
sudden, I will have a blue experience of the apple on my desk. We can even
imagine flipping the switch back and forth a number of times, so that the
red and blue experiences “dance” before my eyes.


This might seem reasonable at first–it is a strangely appealing image–but
something very odd is going on here. My experiences are switching from red
to blue, but I do not notice any change. Even as we flip the switch a
number of times and my qualia dance back and forth, I will simply go about
my business, noticing nothing unusual. By hypothesis, my functional
organization after flipping the switch evolves just as it would have if the
switch had not been flipped. There is no special difference in my
behavioral dispositions. I am not suddenly disposed to say “Hmm! Something
strange is going on!” There is no room for a sudden start, for an
explanation, or even for a distraction of attention. Any unusual reaction
would imply a functional difference between the two circuits, contrary to
their stipulated isomorphism.”


Is there an error in this reasoning? If so, where is it?


Jason
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