Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!Robert.Frederking@CMU-CS-CAD
From: Robert.Frederking%CMU-CS-CAD@sri-unix.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: awareness
Message-ID: <13001@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 24-Oct-83 15:31:13 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.13001
Posted: Mon Oct 24 15:31:13 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 31-Oct-83 04:09:51 EST
Lines: 34


        Sorry about not noticing the functionalist/physicalist
distinction.  Most of the people that I've discussed this with were either
functionalists or dualists.

        The physicalist position doesn't bother me nearly as much as the
functionalist one.  The question seems to be whether awareness is a function
of physical properties, or something that just happens to be associated with
human brains -- that is, whether it's a necessary property of the physical
structure of functioning brains.  For example, the idea that your "soul" is
"inside your body" is a little strange to me -- I tend to think of it as
being similar to the idea of hyperdimensional mathematics, so that a person's
"soul" might exist outside the dimensions we can sense, but communicate with
their body.  I think that physicalism is a reasonable hypothesis, but the
differences are not experimentally verifiable, and dualism seems more
reasonable to me.

        As far as the functionalist counter-argument to mine would go, the
way you phrased it implies that I think that the "soul" explains human
behavior.  Actually, I think that *all* human behavior can be modeled by
physical systems like robots.  I suspect that we'll find physical correlates
to all the information processing behavior we see.  The thing I am
describing is the internal experience.  A functionalist certainly could make
the counter-argument, but the thing that I believe to be important in this
discussion is exactly the question of whether the "soul" is intrinsically
part of the body, or whether it's made of "soul-stuff", not necessarily
"located" in the body (if "souls" have locations), but communicating with
it.  As I implied in my previous post, I am concerned with the eventual
legal and ethical implications of taking a functionalist point of view.

        So I guess I'm saying that I prefer either physicalism or dualism to
functionalism, due to the side-effects that will occur eventually, and that
to me dualism appears the most intuitively correct, although I don't think
anyone can prove any of the positions.