The Problem of Mechanism
This problem seems to be roughly "how do you go from neuron stuff to experience stuff". It is clear from various experiments and brain damage cases that we do move from neuron stuff to experience stuff, but how does it happen?
It will come as no surprise when I say that I don't know what the answer is. However our view is from the inside, from within the bubble of conciousness. We are blind to the workings of our brain, we only 'see' some of the results of its workings. Our experience is based on what makes it into conciousness, and no more. What does it make it is likely to to be processed, and to some degree incomplete. We should not expect the answer to the problem of mechanism to make intuitive sense. We might already have the answer, but not be willing to accept it.
What would the answer look like? What more are we looking for above and beyond the neurons and brain structures that when stimulated just so give us these experiences?
The Problem of Duplicates
Philosophical zombies are 100% identical physically and behaviourally to a concious human being, but lack concious experiences. You can talk to Zombie-Fred and be completely unable to determine whether he is a zombie or not. He'll talk to you about sports, tell you how much he likes a particular movie, and gaze with (seeming) admiration at scenes of natural beauty. Yet Fred has no concious experience. If you poke Zombie-Fred, various neurons and things will do the same as they would do in your body, but what goes on in Zombie-Fred's mental life is just some message that he got poked, with no actual concious feeling or sensation involved.
The argument that accompanies this is something like:
This problem seems to be roughly "how do you go from neuron stuff to experience stuff". It is clear from various experiments and brain damage cases that we do move from neuron stuff to experience stuff, but how does it happen?
It will come as no surprise when I say that I don't know what the answer is. However our view is from the inside, from within the bubble of conciousness. We are blind to the workings of our brain, we only 'see' some of the results of its workings. Our experience is based on what makes it into conciousness, and no more. What does it make it is likely to to be processed, and to some degree incomplete. We should not expect the answer to the problem of mechanism to make intuitive sense. We might already have the answer, but not be willing to accept it.
What would the answer look like? What more are we looking for above and beyond the neurons and brain structures that when stimulated just so give us these experiences?
The Problem of Duplicates
Philosophical zombies are 100% identical physically and behaviourally to a concious human being, but lack concious experiences. You can talk to Zombie-Fred and be completely unable to determine whether he is a zombie or not. He'll talk to you about sports, tell you how much he likes a particular movie, and gaze with (seeming) admiration at scenes of natural beauty. Yet Fred has no concious experience. If you poke Zombie-Fred, various neurons and things will do the same as they would do in your body, but what goes on in Zombie-Fred's mental life is just some message that he got poked, with no actual concious feeling or sensation involved.
The argument that accompanies this is something like:
- Zombies are identical to humans in every way, except they don't have concious experiences.
- Physical activity in a human brain identically replicated in a zombie brain does not result in concious experiences.
- Therefore, there needs to be something extra to create conciousness.
Counterargument: Zombies aren't real.
Is there much more to say? Perhaps I am being too quick at dismissing zombies, but zombies don't seem to be an explanation to fill a gap in our understanding, they seem to be something that is creating a gap that isn't there.
How can Zombie-Fred pass as a proper human without having a conciousness? Doesn't Zombie-Fred need something in its place? It would need some sort of rule or ability to talk about feelings of true love, or how excruciating a pain is, or how joyously vibrant a shade of green is. This would probably not be a difficult problem, and would be something well within Zombie-Fred's abilities, but Zombie-Fred would have something that humans don't have; some sort of "faking having a conciousness" module. However, wouldn't this in principle be an observable difference?
China Brain
If our minds are just the results of neurons arranged in a big complicated machine, wouldn't it be possible to produce the same effect via some different arrangement? The China Brain thought experiment concerned getting billions of Chinese people to replicate the behaviour individual neurons, such that collectively they were simulating a brain. Why Chinese people? I have no idea.
The work that this thought experiment (or intuition pump) does is to show that the China Brain could be "possible and it is functionally equivalent to a normal human being, it supposedly presents the illustration of the absent qualia hyopthesis. Block concludes that functional organisation is not what determines or fixes phenomenological conciousness" (Tye 2007). I think that is a well placed 'supposedly'. The intuition is to dismiss the China Brain. My response is to consider that the China Brain should, in some sense, have its own conciousness. It seems fantastical, and hard to countenance, but it seems where evidence and reason leads. I suppose this could make me a die-hard physicalist, unwilling to consider a non-physical account of conciousness no matter how absurd my position seems to be. But, the China Brain thought experiment doesn't give a reason to reject the possibility of conciousness, only an intuition not to. Intuitions can be useful, but they aren't answers.
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