[ExI] Let's play What If.

[Mike Dougherty]

2010/11/11 Alan Grimes <agrimes at speakeasy.net>:
> Absurd because ideas can't think of ideas. I can think of ideas so
> therefore I'm not any set of ideas.

Absurd?  Absurd because of another Absurdity?  You are making a point
by authority when you have no authority.  I recommend you try the
exercise Stathis suggested.  Only after a discourse where we agree on
some grounds can you begin to build a convincing argument.

> Stick a few electrodes on my skull and you'll see my EEG, you can even
> determine my state of consciousness from it. Combining that with
> anatomical evidence, you can prove that a brain is a person.
>
> If you do the same to a computer you will not be able to detect any
> differences except for the general level of computational activity,
> which has no inherent relationship to the state of the upload.

Can you post a URL to the records you kept from this experiment?  I
would be more likely to conclude that a brain is an unusual piece of
meat that, while fresh, is able to produce detectable electrical
impulses and that when no longer fresh is able to produce only an
offensive odor.  Nowhere in that affirmation can I assert your (or
anyone else's) consciousness.  I am certainly unable to prove that a
lump of meat producing electrical impulse is a person.  If electrical
activity is a proof enough of conscious personhood then any common
piezoelectric crystal could qualify.  Oh right, the EEG is a complex
time-dependent series of impulses and a simple oscillating frequency
quartz crystal isn't good enough.  When the computer (your second
example) starts producing the same time-dependent series of impulses
as the control/reference EEG that "proves" the personhood of the brain
to which it is hooked, will you be concede that the computer is
running a person?  When the computer-hosted EEG pattern that has
already synchronized its pattern with the biologically-hosted EEG
pattern proving the conscious personhood of Alan Grimes detects the
sudden loss of signal from the biological system does it report that
Alan Grimes has died?  Perhaps merely the link was severed, sure.  But
let's assume the system failure is not in the link, but in the
biological system.   As far as I (Mike D.) can tell, the
computer-hosted pattern could continue to be fanatically against
uploading and send emails to the list as such.  I'll grant that I have
no sense of your qualia.  I wonder though if you do either.  :)