X-Message-Number: 25094
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 13:48:23 -0800
Subject: Duplication Problems (to Scott)
From: <>

Dear Scott:

You wrote:

"As Thomas suggested, if a specific part of the brain experiences 
qualia, then there would be a patient somewhere who has suffered 
brain damage to that part of the brain and no longer experiences 
qualia."

Consider what I wrote before: that a person who, due to trauma, is 
no longer capable of experiencing qualia is similarly no longer 
capable of having any conscious experiences, which includes any 
subjective experience you can imagine, whether external or 
internal. Clearly, most people who suffer brain damage do not fall 
within this category. I think such a person would have had to lose 
the entire brain (possibly excepting part of the brain stem) and be 
on life support before the person would actually be incapable of 
experiencing qualia.

[snip]

You wrote:

"I'm still trying to grok the idea of qualia, so tell me... Do we 
experience qualia while we're unconscious?"

No.

You wrote:

"Say in a dreaming state?"

Possibly. I think in a lucid dream, I do experience subjective 
inner-states. But for ordinary dreams, it is as if I wake up having 
memories of the dreams, but never lived through them myself. I 
might be wrong.

[snip]

You wrote:

"You apparently associate the experience of qualia with purely 
physical processes. Clearly, these processes are not absolutely 
continuous. There is at least one microsecond that separates State 
A in your brain/soul from State B. Where is the soul during this 
pause?"

Again, the soul is not a physical process. The soul is a physical 
system. It has objective existence and is part of your brain. When 
you cease experiencing things, say as you sleep or are put under 
anesthesia, your soul doesn't stop existing, no more than your 
heart or lung stop existing. It doesn't 'go' anywhere.

In the Orch OR model of consciousness (which is interesting, even 
though I'm not convinced of its validity; time will tell if 
microtubules are sufficiently isolated during 'gel phase' to 
exhibit quantum phenomena), the qualia experiencer would consists 
of both neurons together with their microtubules, while the actual 
experiences of consciousness would occur 40 times per second, in 
phase with the collapse of microtubule wave functions.

You wrote:

"What if it took the same amount of time to duplicate you as it did 
for your brain to change from State A to State B?  Claiming that 
there is a difference between the original and the copy because of 
differences in location is insufficient. Though it may have been no
more than a microsecond, the original's brain has changed location 
as well. The difference is only a matter of degree. There is no 
substantive difference between the two."

The difference in location is merely one observable difference 
between a copy and the original. The more pressing is one is the 
issue of continuity. One is numerically identical to the original, 
while the other one is not; i.e. they are the same object. You 
cannot blur the distinction here without committing numerous 
fallacies.

You wrote:

"I understand the common sense that seems to lie at the foundations 
of your argument. If I awake in a room with my duplicate, it will 
seem apparent to both of us that there are two qualia experiencers 
and I believe that's true 'almost' immediately, but not for the 
first instant of duplication."

This is like saying, 'It isn't true for the first second that there 
are two hearts in the room.' Of course they have two hearts. That 
the atomic arrangement of the hearts is the same is irrelevant to 
the question of how many of them there are in the room. In a 
similar fashion, they have two qualia experiencers.

You wrote:

"Here's a thought experiment. What if technology was capable of 
immediately connecting the minds of the original and the copy at 
the moment of duplication so that each shared all of the 
experiences of the other.  Would there be two qualia experiencers 
experiencing 
identical qualia or would there be one experiencer in two 
locations."

Two brains, two qualia experiencers.

[snip]

You wrote:

"My response: Right. So if I gradually replace your neurons with 
artificial duplicates, and I then connect you to a computer so that 
your 'soul' is distributed across two articial substrates (much 
like the twins were connected in the example above), and like 
before,
there is a complete sense of subjective continuity, then the same 
rules apply. If I disconnect the artificial brain from the computer 
we suddenly have two experiencers but now the difference is that 
the
new experiencer was created not by duplication but by extending the 
original. Was one soul split into two?"

You always have two experiencers, that is, if the computer is even 
designed in such a way that it is capble of experiencing qualia. 
You would have to reengineer the brain and produce a highly 
specialized computer in order to create a single qualia 
experiencer. You can't simply connect two experiencers with a 
cable.

[snip]

Best Regards,

Richard B. R.

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