[ExI] Wernicke's aphasia and the CRA.

[Gordon Swobe]

--- On Sat, 12/12/09, John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net> wrote:

> Most of the things a neuron does is routine
> housekeeping stuff no different from what a cell in you
> large intestine needs to do just to keep alive. There would
> be no need to duplicate all that stuff to make a
> functionally equivalent electronic brain.

You've taken a leap of faith there if you think it will have consciousness. That's fine, provided you understand the difference between faith and knowledge.

Philosophers like Searle investigate what we can actually know. And what we can know is this: 1) real biological brains have consciousness, 2) we know of nothing else in the universe that has it, 3) if we want to create it artificially and *know for certain* that we've done so then we need first to understand exactly how it happens in real biological brains.

Searle scolds neuroscientists for not working harder on this all important question. He blames their complacency on the mystical dualistic mind/matter philosophy handed down to us from the likes of Descartes, a philosophy which made mental phenomena seem somehow outside the scope of natural science.

-gts