Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

146 I HOW THE MIND WORKS• What if we took that program and trained a large number of people,say, the population of China, to hold in mind the data and act out thesteps? Would there be one gigantic consciousness hovering overt China,separate from the consciousnesses of the billion individuals? If they wereimplementing the brain state for agonizing pain, would there be someentity that really was in pain, even if every citizen was cheerful and lighthearted?• Suppose the visual receiving area at the back of your brain was surgicallysevered from the rest and remained alive in your skull, receivinginput from the eyes. By every behavioral measure you are blind. Is therea mute but fully aware visual consciousness sealed off in the back of yourhead? What if it was removed and kept alive in a dish?• Might your experience of red be the same as my experience ofgreen? Sure, you might label grass as "green" and tomatoes as "red," justas I do, but perhaps you actually see the grass as having the color that Iwould describe, if I were in your shoes, as red.• Could there be zombies? That is, could there be an android riggedup to act as intelligently and as emotionally as you and me, but in whichthere is "no one home" who is actually feeling or seeing anything? How doI know that you're not a zombie?• If someone could download the state of my brain and duplicate it inanother collection of molecules, would it have my consciousness? Ifsomeone destroyed the original, but the duplicate continued to live mylife and think my thoughts and feel my feelings, would I have been murdered?Was Captain Kirk snuffed out and replaced by a twin every timehe stepped into the transporter room?i• What is it like to be a bat? Do beetles enjoy sex? Does a wormscream silently when a fisherman impales it on a hook?• Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicatesits input-output functions. You feel and behave exactly as before.Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until moreand more of your brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip doesexactly what the neuron did, your behavior and memory never change.Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some otherconscious entity moving in with you?Beats the heck out of me! I have some prejudices, but no idea of howto begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone else.The computational theory of mind offers no insight; neither does any