If it did, we would need to solve the hard problem of consciousness, which seems significantly harder than just WBE.
Doesn’t WBE involve the easy rather than hard problem of consciousness? You don’t need to solve why anything is conscious in the first place, because you can just take it as a given that human brains are conscious and re-implement the computational and biological mechanisms that are relevant for their consciousness.
You don’t need to solve why anything is conscious in the first place, because you can just take it as a given that human brains are conscious and re-implement the computational and biological mechanisms that are relevant for their consciousness.
I’m pretty sure the problem with this is that we don’t know what it is about the human brain that gives rise to consciousness, and therefore we don’t know whether we are actually emulating the consciousness-generating thing when we do WBE. Human conscious experience could be the biological computation of neurons + X. We might be able to emulate biological computation perfectly, but if X is necessary for conscious experience then we’ve just created a philosophical zombie. To find out whether our emulation is sufficient to produce consciousness, we would need to find out what X is and how to emulate it. I’m pretty sure this is exactly the hard problem of consciousness.
Even if biological computation is sufficient for generating consciousness, we will have no way of knowing until we solve the hard problem of consciousness.
Human conscious experience could be the biological computation of neurons + X. We might be able to emulate biological computation perfectly, but if X is necessary for conscious experience then we’ve just created a philosophical zombie.
David Chalmers had a pretty convincing (to me) argument for why it feels very implausible that an upload with identical behavior and functional organization to the biological brain wouldn’t be conscious (the central argument starts from the subheading “3 Fading Qualia”): http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html
What a great read! I suppose I’m not convinced that Fading Qualia is an empirical impossibility, and therefore that there exists a moment of Suddenly Disappearing Qualia when the last neuron is replaced with a silicon chip. If consciousness is quantized (just like other things in the universe), then there is nothing wrong in principle with Suddenly Disappearing Qualia when a single quantum of qualia is removed from a system with no other qualia, just like removing the last photon from a vacuum.
Joe is an interesting character which Chalmers thinks is implausible, but aside from it rubbing up against a faint intuition, I have no reason to believe that Joe is experiencing Fading Qualia. There is no indication for any reason that the workings of consciousness should obey any intuitions we may have about it.
There is no indication for any reason that the workings of consciousness should obey any intuitions we may have about it.
The mind is an evolved system out to do stuff efficiently, not just a completely inscrutable object of philosophical analysis. It’s likelier that the parts like sensible cognition and qualia and the subjective feeling of consciousness are coupled and need each other to work than that they were somehow intrinsically disconnected and cognition could go on as usual without subjective consciousness using anything close to the same architecture. If that were the case, we’d have the additional questions of how consciousness evolved to be a part of the system to begin with and why hasn’t it evolved out of living biological humans.
I agree with you, though I personally wouldn’t classify this as purely an intuition since it is informed by reasoning which itself was gathered from scientific knowledge about the world. Chalmers doesn’t think that Joe could exist because it doesn’t seem right to him. You believe your statement because you know some scientific truths about how things in our world come to be (i.e. natural selection) and use this knowledge to reason about other things that exist in the world (consciousness), not merely because the assertion seems right to you.
Doesn’t WBE involve the easy rather than hard problem of consciousness? You don’t need to solve why anything is conscious in the first place, because you can just take it as a given that human brains are conscious and re-implement the computational and biological mechanisms that are relevant for their consciousness.
I’m pretty sure the problem with this is that we don’t know what it is about the human brain that gives rise to consciousness, and therefore we don’t know whether we are actually emulating the consciousness-generating thing when we do WBE. Human conscious experience could be the biological computation of neurons + X. We might be able to emulate biological computation perfectly, but if X is necessary for conscious experience then we’ve just created a philosophical zombie. To find out whether our emulation is sufficient to produce consciousness, we would need to find out what X is and how to emulate it. I’m pretty sure this is exactly the hard problem of consciousness.
Even if biological computation is sufficient for generating consciousness, we will have no way of knowing until we solve the hard problem of consciousness.
David Chalmers had a pretty convincing (to me) argument for why it feels very implausible that an upload with identical behavior and functional organization to the biological brain wouldn’t be conscious (the central argument starts from the subheading “3 Fading Qualia”): http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html
What a great read! I suppose I’m not convinced that Fading Qualia is an empirical impossibility, and therefore that there exists a moment of Suddenly Disappearing Qualia when the last neuron is replaced with a silicon chip. If consciousness is quantized (just like other things in the universe), then there is nothing wrong in principle with Suddenly Disappearing Qualia when a single quantum of qualia is removed from a system with no other qualia, just like removing the last photon from a vacuum.
Joe is an interesting character which Chalmers thinks is implausible, but aside from it rubbing up against a faint intuition, I have no reason to believe that Joe is experiencing Fading Qualia. There is no indication for any reason that the workings of consciousness should obey any intuitions we may have about it.
The mind is an evolved system out to do stuff efficiently, not just a completely inscrutable object of philosophical analysis. It’s likelier that the parts like sensible cognition and qualia and the subjective feeling of consciousness are coupled and need each other to work than that they were somehow intrinsically disconnected and cognition could go on as usual without subjective consciousness using anything close to the same architecture. If that were the case, we’d have the additional questions of how consciousness evolved to be a part of the system to begin with and why hasn’t it evolved out of living biological humans.
I agree with you, though I personally wouldn’t classify this as purely an intuition since it is informed by reasoning which itself was gathered from scientific knowledge about the world. Chalmers doesn’t think that Joe could exist because it doesn’t seem right to him. You believe your statement because you know some scientific truths about how things in our world come to be (i.e. natural selection) and use this knowledge to reason about other things that exist in the world (consciousness), not merely because the assertion seems right to you.