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Christopher Brown's avatar

I'm with Andrew Luscombe that the interpretation of Mandelbaum's third argument as presented in this blog post is inaccurate.

Here is Mandelbaum's argument as I understand it (btw I am a former PhD student of his when he taught a class with Ned Block on cognitive penetration):

1. if phenomenal overflow exists, this requires that phenomenal properties are not grounded only in the connectome2. there are good empirical reasons for thinking that phenomenal overflow exists3. so phenomenal properties are not grounded only in the connectome4. motivation-relevant valenced psychological properties (which are functionally-defined attraction and avoidance dispositions, such as are typically used to motivate e.g. human workers) require appropriate phenomenal properties5. so a whole brain emulation of only the connectome would not instantiate motivational-relevant valenced psychological properties

Your post ignores his discussion of phenomenal overflow, which I take to be the central argument in his paper. He absolutely does not claim that the problem with a connectome-only upload is that it would be functionally indistinguishable from a human, though phenomenally different. For instance, when he rhetorically asks "could your connectome duplicate be you even if, for example, it was a sickly sloth while you are a dynamo bursting at the seams with energy and ideas?" Clearly this is a behavioral difference that he is interested in.

Btw I happen to think that this argument likely fails, but you are addressing a straw man. Perhaps instead of patting yourselves on the backs for identifying the supposedly-bad peer review practices of philosophy journals (which are actually quite rigorous), you might instead try a bit harder to apply the principle of charity when reading the paper under consideration.

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Peter Gerdes's avatar

Ha Ha, pissing phenomenal states ... I don't understand how autocorrect got there. Maybe I originally said missing by accident rather than having?

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