Caledonian: It doesn’t look to me like Philosophy has always been dominated by people with such a weak grip on the opposing positions, at least with respect to reduction. Russell, for instance, is a clear counter example, though he was weak in his understanding of the economic mind set. Definitions are a useful tool for thought, not the whole thing. The classical disproof of positivism is that it is self-contradictory. “Only the empirical can be true”, but that statement is not empirical.
Will Pearson: I share some of your suspicion that replacing neurons may not be possible. Reactions to mind altering substances should be fairly easy. Ditto reaction to acceleration etc. I don’t think that any of those, nor the diseases nor the EM radiation really need to be copied according to the “generalized anti-zombie principle” in any event. Would you really worry about a pill that eliminated all of them possibly also eliminating phenomenal consciousness? Seems far more likely that it would preserve it from those things. OTOH, mimicking the construction of new neurons and connections sounds very tough. It doesn’t seem very likely to me that after replacing my brain with these robots I wouldn’t still be “conscious” and “me” but it seems not unlikely that I would fairly soon be a brain damaged version of “me”, possibly in a manner that was opaque from outside, possibly in a manner that was at first opaque from outside and later not.
Caledonian: It doesn’t look to me like Philosophy has always been dominated by people with such a weak grip on the opposing positions, at least with respect to reduction. Russell, for instance, is a clear counter example, though he was weak in his understanding of the economic mind set. Definitions are a useful tool for thought, not the whole thing. The classical disproof of positivism is that it is self-contradictory. “Only the empirical can be true”, but that statement is not empirical.
Will Pearson: I share some of your suspicion that replacing neurons may not be possible. Reactions to mind altering substances should be fairly easy. Ditto reaction to acceleration etc. I don’t think that any of those, nor the diseases nor the EM radiation really need to be copied according to the “generalized anti-zombie principle” in any event. Would you really worry about a pill that eliminated all of them possibly also eliminating phenomenal consciousness? Seems far more likely that it would preserve it from those things. OTOH, mimicking the construction of new neurons and connections sounds very tough. It doesn’t seem very likely to me that after replacing my brain with these robots I wouldn’t still be “conscious” and “me” but it seems not unlikely that I would fairly soon be a brain damaged version of “me”, possibly in a manner that was opaque from outside, possibly in a manner that was at first opaque from outside and later not.