Little Idiot wrote:
You have that same problem with the fence that I talked about before;
you dont accept the p-zombie, remember
Of course there is no problem for functional physical thought, if you buy the functional theory, its the rest of us looking at it how have the problem with it. I was very specific which kind of problem too, the functional method suggests a silly conclusion in the case of 'blockhead'
(or was it Brockhead, I forget, tired now... EDIT it was 'Blockhead', after Ned Block who came up with it. Its on Wiki, luckily for me.
Any I made the criticism, you glossed over it.
You did a good job of avoiding answering my question on though being conscious thought being other than subjective. Answering with a question is not an answer.
Re lizard though, do you suggest lizard thought is conscious?
My question is about conscious human thought.
I am not a lizard (although you may think differently) so I dont do lizard thought much.
I am trying to get you to see the 'and' that you put in your own post and trying to figure out whether you believe that thought can't be accounted for by a physical brain.
You keep dragging in the clause AFTER the and which is about SE.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/functionalism/
A related objection, the “absent qualia” objection, maintains that there could be creatures functionally equivalent to normal humans whose mental states have no qualitative character at all. In his well-known “Chinese nation” thought-experiment, Block (1980b) imagines that the population of China (chosen because its size approximates the number of neurons in a typical human brain) is recruited to duplicate his functional organization for a period of time, receiving the equivalent of sensory input from an artificial body and passing messages back and forth via satellite. Block argues that such a “homunculi-headed” system — or “Blockhead”, as it has come to be called — would not have mental states with any qualitative character (other than the qualia possessed by the individuals themselves), and thus that states functionally equivalent to sensations or perceptions may lack their characteristic “feels”. Conversely, it has also been argued that functional role is not necessary for qualitative character: for example, the argument goes, people may have mild, but distinctive, twinges that have no typical causes or characteristic effects.
This is pretty much state-of-the-art woohead for consciousness.
There are unconscious thought processes and there is little reason to think they are different
in capability than the conscious ones. Experimental evidence shows that they are merely faster and involve smaller areas of the cortex and have been previously learned by repetition.
When you read you are hardly conscious of individual words and rarely conscious of letters. Furthermore there is context that modifies meaning that you process completely in the background.
"His pitch had the audience captivated"
"His pitch was wide"
If you were not familiar with baseball, but did know sales pitches, the second sentence could have you consciously cogitating but not the first.
Both are considered thought. At least in my world.
