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eucIib t1_ja6m506 wrote

I disagree with the claim that consciousness must necessarily be accompanied by a body. I think the author is making too strong of a claim.

The phantom limb phenomenon is the state of being conscious of a part of the body that one literally does not have. I am making the claim that it is possible to be conscious of parts of the body that no longer exist.

If the authors claim is true, why doesn’t consciousness of that part of the body completely subside when the limb is lost?

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StopOk2967 t1_ja6y2wz wrote

I intuitively think that your claim is true but I think your argument doesn't work.

The author would say that "for everything conscious there is a body underlying it". In most of the cases this is (most of) our brain. But that isn't the same as to say that "For every body part: there is a consciousness based on it". Having our legs removed doesn't change our ability to have what the author calls "landscape of joy" or processing feelings.

What you describe is an error in perception of something. The person is still conscious though, as you describe yourself. Conscious of something that isn't there, but nevertheless conscious.

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eucIib t1_ja7wtd3 wrote

If a person can be conscious of a foot that doesn’t exist, why not a leg? If they can be conscious of a leg that doesn’t exist, why not the entire lower body? If they can be conscious of a lower body that doesn’t exist, why not the torso as well?

See what I’m saying? If you follow this to it’s logical conclusion, you will just have a brain that is conscious of a body it does not have. Now, obviously a human wouldn’t survive without its organs, but how can we assume that this isn’t possible for AI? I’m not saying I’m right, I’m more-so making the claim that the author is being too confident in his argument that AI needs a body to be conscious.

I also find the authors argument for AI not having feelings more compelling than AI not having consciousness, though for some reason he seems to lump them together as if they’re one in the same.

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Ghostyfied t1_ja9xbvm wrote

Your argument might be right, we can only tell once someone would experience this. And because of the fact that no one has experienced before how it is to be conscious completely without a body (or at the very least, we do not know of such an event) we can not say with certainty that it is possible.
And I think that means that without further knowledge, both your and the authors argument concerning this specific situation could be correct here.

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Wolfe_Thorne t1_ja73x4t wrote

I think I read somewhere that phantom limb syndrome is caused by the neural connections in the brain that were devoted to motor functions and sensations still remaining even when the limb is gone.

It does raise the question, if such connections were somehow exactly replicated, would an AI be conscious of a limb? What about an entire body? If all sensation could be replicated, could we make a “human” AI entirely in a digital environment? After all, our human brains are just meat computers interpreting electrical signals from our bodies, I can’t imagine they’re impossible to reproduce artificially.

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fatty2cent t1_ja9ocqt wrote

I think the problem is that there once was a mapped body part, and then it was removed. Is there phantom limbs in people who never had said limb? Can you have phantom limbs that exceed the normal limb arrangement of a human body? Likely not.

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Lock-out t1_ja7x7r8 wrote

This is why philosophy is useless on its own; just people claiming things without any evidence or experience.

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