Not by definition, but by consequence of the materialist belief, that the neurons are everything there is to a mind. There may be excellent reasons for that belief, but the experiment, if carried out, would be an empirical test of it, not a joke.
You’d have to ask someone who believes in such a supernatural influence, where it intervenes. You’d also have to ask the materialist how they determined that they were replacing neurons with physically equivalent devices. It’s difficult to determine the input-output behaviour of a single component when it’s embedded in a complex machine whose overall operation one knows very little about, and cutting it out to analyse it might destroy its ablity to respond to the supernatural forces.
As context to these remarks, I’ve read some of the discussion between Rolf Andreassen and John C Wright on the latter’s blog, and whatever I might think of supernatural stuff, I must agree with Wright that Rolf is persistently smuggling his materialist assumptions into his arguments and then pulling them out as the conclusion.
Not by definition, but by consequence of the materialist belief, that the neurons are everything there is to a mind. There may be excellent reasons for that belief, but the experiment, if carried out, would be an empirical test of it, not a joke.
Hence Eliezer’s response.
Weeell, if there was some supernatural influence wouldn’t it need to show itself, somehow, in neuron input/output patterns?
You’d have to ask someone who believes in such a supernatural influence, where it intervenes. You’d also have to ask the materialist how they determined that they were replacing neurons with physically equivalent devices. It’s difficult to determine the input-output behaviour of a single component when it’s embedded in a complex machine whose overall operation one knows very little about, and cutting it out to analyse it might destroy its ablity to respond to the supernatural forces.
As context to these remarks, I’ve read some of the discussion between Rolf Andreassen and John C Wright on the latter’s blog, and whatever I might think of supernatural stuff, I must agree with Wright that Rolf is persistently smuggling his materialist assumptions into his arguments and then pulling them out as the conclusion.
By what definition outputting “No” when input “Do you still have qualia?” is not an input-output pattern?