[ExI] Wernicke's aphasia and the CRA.

[John Clark]

On Dec 12, 2009, at 10:42 AM, Gordon Swobe 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.

Yes but no bigger a leap of faith than I have in thinking that you are conscious.

> Philosophers like Searle investigate what we can actually know.

And the only thing I actually know about you is that you have the ability to generate a certain sequence if ASCII characters. And yet I think you were conscious when you wrote it.

> And what we can know is this: 1) real biological brains have consciousness

Why the plural? You know is that one biological brain has consciousness. Sometimes.

> 2) we know of nothing else in the universe that has it

How do you know that? How do you know that a brick is not conscious? Because it doesn't act intelligently. 

> 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.

Why? We don't know how biological brains work but we still think they're conscious except when they're acting like they are not.

> 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

Descartes just got his grammar wrong, he thought he was a noun and not an adjective; but Searle is the real dualist, he clearly thinks intelligence and consciousness have little to do with each other.

 John K Clark



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