[ExI] Is the brain a digital computer?

[Stefano Vaj]

On 2 March 2010 22:10, Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> We can quite easily reduce mental phenomena epistemically without reducing the same phenomena ontologically. I mean here that we can understand mental phenomena in scientific terms of neurological causes and effects without abandoning the common sense notion that mental phenomena have an irreducibly subjective ontology.

We can perhaps. But why ever should we?

The real crux of the neverending "debate" which has given place to
some complaint is that the "common sense" or not of non-falsifiable
statementz is a cultural byproduct which cannot really be either
confirmed or disproved, and we are bound to tracing its genealogy and
verifying who may still adhere to some version thereof, and who does
not find it very compelling any more.

Let us take a computer specialised in... examining Turing-test
candidates. Let us say that its performance are equal or superior to
that of human examiners. Let us say that it is instructed to decide
whether it is itself a good candidate or not. If its answer is "yes",
as far as I am concerned it is by definition as conscious as yourself
or myself (see the paradox of philosophical zombies wrongly persuaded
to be conscious, and subvocalising, firing synapses, taking attitudes,
etc., to this effect).

You have obviously faith-based reasons to believe otherwise, but we
should realise once and forever that there are no conceivable ways to
demonstrate that you are wrong, since this has to do with personal,
factual-invariant interpretations and views of the world.

-- 
Stefano Vaj