Comment on Can science come to understand consciousness? A problem of philosophical zombies (Yes, I know, P-zombies again.)

Sat, 22 Nov 2014 23:34:17 GMT

comment in a previous thread with similar topic

I heard on the televisionthat some blind click had developed the skill of seeing with clicks. It sounded cool and worth the effort so I trained myself to have that abiilty too. Yes, it was fun as predicted but not totally mindblowing. No, it is not impossible.

Small babies have eyes that recieve light but they can't see because they can't process the information sufficently. For hearing people retain this property after being 3 days old. There is no natural incentive to be particulaltry picky about hearing, you can be a human just fine without being a echolocator (with just stereo hearing) and not even know you are missing anything. (Humans are seers, not sniffers like dogs or hearers like bats. Humans are also trichronmats while the average animal is a quadrochromat and yes still a human that doesn' feel like missing out on anything because you don't know you are the handicapped minority)

The argument is like because people are naturally illiterate they can't possibly imagine what it would be to see instead of hear words. If you don't go outside of the experience of a medieval peasant that might hold. If you are given a text ina foreign alphabeth and later given the alphabeth and asked to point out the letters you saw you might not be able to complete the task. That you have this property doesn't mean it can't be changed with training. Your ability to see letters will be improved if you work on your literacy. People as able to work for a more efficient sensory processing. And this includes also high end stuff such as synesthetic ability to use spatial metaphors for amounts. There are people whos processes of identifying a letter/number give it a color associaton. It's not that the information would be in the wrong format for the brain to accept it. It is that the brain is in a insufficiently expressive format yet to represent the stimuli. But it is more of the duty of the brain to change rather than the incomprehensibility of the object. Map and territority etc.

People that argue that imagination can't encompass that have not seriosly tried. And even if they have seriosly tried that is more evidence for their lower than average imagination capability than the truth of their argument. "What it is to be a human" isn't even nearly so standard that it can be referenced as single monolithic concept much less a axiom that doesn't need to be stated.

So claiming logical impossibility is hasty in the greatest measure available.

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