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Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos  I don't seem to be able to make myself understood here. It may not necessarily be the case that any old simulation of a brain will produce consciousness. The simulation may have to be performed with certain kinds of hardware, in certain configurations, with certain sorts of software running, and so forth. Since consciousness is a result of a process, all the details of the process, both hardware and software, may matter. Heck, it could turn out that only wetware is capable of consciousness, so the simulation would have to be run on a wetware computer, possibly one very similar to an actual brain. Who knows?
In fact, here's a question for you: What if we built a brain? Would it be conscious?
~~ Paul |
I am not sure that is entirely fair - as I am sure you know, pure computation can move from hardware to hardware without being affected in any way. The internal architecture of a Celeron processor (say) is utterly different from an 80486 chip, yet it can run all the software that used to run on the old chip - but a lot faster. As another example, Java can run on a vast range of architectures. I think the real point is that physicalists are more or less limited to looking at the computation that the brain does - because it is essentially impossible to conceive of what else a physical system can do that might relate to consciousness. That is why most of them sneer at the idea that QM is involved in a fundamental way. Also, you are rather backing away from your original assertion that the simulation would indeed capture everything of the original.
On to your question - if we built a brain! First, I would say that our respective positions are not exactly symmetrical. Many materialists seem to almost take the view that consciousness is already almost understood - it is only when really pushed that they start to back off a bit. Conversely, we on the other side are really trying to point out that there is a big black hole of knowledge in this area - even at the conceptual level. Thus, I feel it is reasonable to demand more definite answers from materialists.
Obviously my answer is a maybe - my bet is that at some point in the womb, our brains attach to some mental stuff. Quite probably that attraction process is affected by our genes, but that is another matter. Thus the answer to your question depends on whether an adult brain - created from scratch - still possesses that attachment mechanism. Of course, perhaps the building process would involve a developmental process analogous to what goes on in the womb, in which case.....
Maybe such a brain would indeed be like a TV set with no signal!
I know you will say that the above description is highly speculative, but by demonstrating how inadequate (and downright peculiar) the conventional view of consciousness is, I think such speculation seems quite justified.
David