X-Message-Number: 25070
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 07:08:06 -0800
Subject: Response to Thomas
From: <>

Dear Thomas:

You wrote:

"You suggest (?) that the physical part of our brains which 
experiences
qualia constitutes (?) our soul. This of course makes an important
assumption, that there is a PART of our brains which experiences
qualia."

We can clearly lose parts of our brains and yet experience qualia. 
The scope of those qualia may be reduced, as in your example, but 
that doesn't chance the fact that experience remains. Further, 
regions of our brain connected with long-term memory (for example) 
don't seem to be essential to the experience of qualia.

For these reasons, it makes sense to describe the soul as being 
only part of the brain. 

[snip]

You wrote:

"Again, what happens to a person who loses that part of their 
brain,
by accident or mistaken surgery or (for that matter) the 
destruction
caused by a brain tumor? Does he/she continue living as before? If 
some part of our brains experiences qualia, then we must consider
the possibility that that part might sometimes become damaged, or
that some people might be born without it (a birth deformity)."

You can damage the neural circuit comprising the qualia 
experiencer, but personal survival is assured as long as the 
circuit retains the ability to experience qualia. For any case of 
brain injury in which the person survives (possibly excepting brain 
death), this will be true.

I don't consider it possible to be born without a qualia 
experiencer (except perhaps people born without a brain---I'd have 
to know more about the medical phenomenon). In order to experience 
no qualia, the person would have to be unable to see, to hear, to 
touch, to taste, to smell, to think, to feel emotion, to have a 
state of mind, to experience any subjectivity at all. A person who 
can't do any of this won't even behave like a 'person', but more 
like a rock. 

You wrote:

"Again, you raise some very subtle questions about what is and what
is not 'the same' experience of qualia."

It is important to distinguish an experience from the experiencer. 
Two different experiencers of qualia (say, you and I) may have the 
same experience (say, of the color red). This doesn't mean they 
have the same qualia experiencer.

You wrote:

"As others have suggested, what happens if we make a copy of you 
(forgetting entirely the tremendous practical difficulties of doing 
so)? In what way does this copy not have the same experience of 
qualia."

The duplicate will surely have its own subjective inner-life, its 
own experience of qualia. And if subjected to a given set of 
circumstances, the duplicate will experience the same thing that 
the original would experience, if also subjected to those same 
circumstances.

However, this does not change the fact that the duplicate and the 
original have separate qualia experiencers. When you destroy the 
qualia experiencer of the one, then it is forever gone; its qualia 
experiencer does not magically hop bodies to its clone, because the 
qualia experiencer is a physical thing (it can do no hopping, and 
it can indeed be destroyed).

[snip]

You wrote:

"When the copy wakes up, why is this copy not the same as you."

Precisely because the duplicate has a different qualia experiencer! 
This qualia experiencer may be atomically indistinguishable from 
mine, but it is still, nonetheless, a different qualia experiencer. 
A duplicate is not the same thing as whatever it was patterned 
from.

You wrote:

"(If we constantly change the atoms and molecules making us up, 
then in what way does this differ from the operation I've just 
discussed above? "

Because changing a thing is not the same as duplicating it. You can 
change my qualia experiencer, and my personal survival is assured 
as long as you don't change it in such a way that it ceases to be a 
qualia experiencer. If you were to change my brain in such a way 
that I no longer had a qualia experiencer, then my soul would have 
been destroyed, and mucking with the atoms in my head to build a 
new qualia experiencer would not help me at all.

(As an aside, I do think it is possible to gradually replace the 
brain with artificial constructs, and I don't think this would 
result in destruction of the subjective inner-life of the 
individual, at least, not if done properly.)

You wrote:

"Because of these questions I remain unclear about just what your
definition of a 'soul' may be."

Hopefully I have clarified things. Thanks for participating.

You wrote:

"I will add some things here in your support, at least broadly.
You say that this center for qualia is a CPU."

I mean to say, our brain is like a CPU, in that its composed of 
physical stuff which operates as a system. I don't mean, of course, 
that our brain is functionally equivalent to a CPU (or visa versa).

A CPU of sufficient complexity can be expected to have its own 
qualia experiencer. Running software on the CPU doesn't change its 
qualia experiencer. This is one reason why uploading is doomed to 
fail.

You wrote:

"A program is just a set of directions for changes in a physical 
computer, while we don't work that way at all."

Agreed.

Best Regards,

Richard B. R.

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