I’m close to your conclusion, but I don’t accept your Searle-esque argument. I accept Chalmers’s reasoning, roughly, on the fading qualia argument, and agree with you that it doesn’t justify the usual conception of the joys of uploading.
And I think that’s the whole core of what needs to be said on the topic. That is, we have a good argument for attributing consciousness-as-we-know-it to a fine-grained functional duplicate of ourselves. And that’s all. We don’t have any reason to believe that a coarse-grained functional duplicate—a being that gives similar behavioral outputs for a given input, but uses different structures and processes—would have a subjectivity like ours. (“Fine-grained” is an apropos choice of terminology by Chalmers.)
Our terms for subjective experiences, like pain, joy, the sensation of sweetness, and so on, ultimately have ostensive definitions. They’re this, this, and this. And for concepts like that, it matters what the actual physical structures and processes are, that underly the actual phenomena we were attending to when we introduced the terms. (I don’t think the generic term “consciousness” works this way, though. I’ll avoid that subject for now and stick to some classic examples of qualia.)
This has great significance for uploading if, as I expect, human-like computer intelligence is developed not by directly simulating the human brain at a detailed level, but by taking advantage of the distinctive features of silicon and successor technologies. In that case, “uploading” looks to be the prudential equivalent of suicide.
That exactly seems quite close to Searle to me, in that you are both imposing specific requirements for the substrate—which is all that Searle does really. There is the possible difference that you might be more generous than Searle about what constitutes a valid substrate (though Searle isn’t really too clear on that issue anyway).
Unlike Searle, and like Sharvy, I believe it ain’t the meat, it’s the motion (see the Sharvy reference at the bottom). Sharvy presents a fading qualia argument much like the one Chalmers offers in the link simplicio provides, only, to my recollection, without Chalmers’s wise caveat that the functional isomorphism should be fine-grained.
I’m close to your conclusion, but I don’t accept your Searle-esque argument. I accept Chalmers’s reasoning, roughly, on the fading qualia argument, and agree with you that it doesn’t justify the usual conception of the joys of uploading.
And I think that’s the whole core of what needs to be said on the topic. That is, we have a good argument for attributing consciousness-as-we-know-it to a fine-grained functional duplicate of ourselves. And that’s all. We don’t have any reason to believe that a coarse-grained functional duplicate—a being that gives similar behavioral outputs for a given input, but uses different structures and processes—would have a subjectivity like ours. (“Fine-grained” is an apropos choice of terminology by Chalmers.)
Our terms for subjective experiences, like pain, joy, the sensation of sweetness, and so on, ultimately have ostensive definitions. They’re this, this, and this. And for concepts like that, it matters what the actual physical structures and processes are, that underly the actual phenomena we were attending to when we introduced the terms. (I don’t think the generic term “consciousness” works this way, though. I’ll avoid that subject for now and stick to some classic examples of qualia.)
This has great significance for uploading if, as I expect, human-like computer intelligence is developed not by directly simulating the human brain at a detailed level, but by taking advantage of the distinctive features of silicon and successor technologies. In that case, “uploading” looks to be the prudential equivalent of suicide.
That exactly seems quite close to Searle to me, in that you are both imposing specific requirements for the substrate—which is all that Searle does really. There is the possible difference that you might be more generous than Searle about what constitutes a valid substrate (though Searle isn’t really too clear on that issue anyway).
Unlike Searle, and like Sharvy, I believe it ain’t the meat, it’s the motion (see the Sharvy reference at the bottom). Sharvy presents a fading qualia argument much like the one Chalmers offers in the link simplicio provides, only, to my recollection, without Chalmers’s wise caveat that the functional isomorphism should be fine-grained.