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dcshiller.bsky.social

@dcshiller.bsky.social

dcshiller.bsky.social @dcshiller.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

I discuss this and other related thought experiments in “Bomb threats for functionalists”, out at Erkenntnis: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.com

Bomb Threats for Functionalists - Erkenntnis

Functionalist theories of consciousness attribute consciousness to a system when it displays specific patterns of behaviors and state changes in response to perceptual events and its prior state. Thes...

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dcshiller.bsky.social @dcshiller.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

By chance, the connections may never fire. The brain actually acts just like a normal human brain despite its abnormal counterfactual tendencies. Functionalism denies it consciousness, even though its activities are human-identical.

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dcshiller.bsky.social @dcshiller.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

A system's functional profile depends on the state transitions it is likely to undergo, even if it doesn’t. Take a normal human brain and add a bunch of chancy neural connections. These change state transition probabilities: it isn’t conscious.

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dcshiller.bsky.social @dcshiller.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Functionalism about consciousness makes some counterintuitive predictions even granting the world is purely physical. The most interesting come from its dependence on counterfactuals.

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dcshiller.bsky.social @dcshiller.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Academia seems to encourage people to defend their positions with confidence, but consciousness is such a big, confusing, and controversial topic that at the end of the day none of us should feel all that good about our own positions. I appreciate that this piece tries to expose the nuances.

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