Imagine next a whole range of cases, in each of which, in a single operation, a different proportion of the cells in your brain and body would be replaced with exact duplicates. At the near end of this range, only 1 or 2 per cent would be replaced; in the middle, 40 or 60 per cent; near the far end, 98 or 99 per cent. At the far end of this range is pure teletransportation, the case in which all of your cells would be ‘replaced’
This reminds me of the Ship of Theseus
teletransportation
A hypothetical method of transportation in which matter is converted into minute particles or into energy at one point and re-created in original form at another.
it being impossible for any one to per-ceive without perceiving that he does perceive.
This reminds me of the phrase "I think therefore I am"
A second important lesson that we’ve learned about free will in this chapter is that it’s not something that we exercise continuously. In other words, if we have free will, then we only exercise it intermittently, at certain specific moments.
This is an interesting distinction about free will. This would make sense as the article previously stated that there's some decisions that the brain acts on "autopilot" in these cases it would make sense that we wouldn't be considered having free choice, as these were decisions that were made without actively choosing them.
That is, most people judge that you can have free will and be responsible for your actions even if all of your decisions and actions are entirely caused by earlier events in accord with natural laws
While this may seem contradictory, I do see the point it is trying to make. I think this view of free will is like a role-playing game like Mass Effect. Every choice that the player can make is already predefined, but the player still decides which path to go down - even if it's already set.
Many philosophers, includ-ing me, understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires.
This is the best definition of free will in my opinion. Free will doesn't mean that we get to do whatever we want, but instead we have the ability to choose what we want to do based on what we know currently.
It holds that physical systems with the same abstract organization will give rise to the same kind of conscious experience, no mat-ter what they are made of.
Looking at the converse "Physical systems with different organizations will give rise to different kids of conscious experiences" is, in my opinion, the best explanation of how the physical phenomena cause distinct, subjective, experiences.
If existing fundamental theories cannot encompass it, then something new is required.
This makes sense, and expands on my previous annotation asking if consciousness is an axiom.
If the existence of consciousness cannot be derived from physical laws, a theory of physics is not a true theory of everything.
Is there a possibility that consciousness is an axiomatic truth? It is impossible to prove, but we know it exists and it acts as the foundation of other ideas.
But there is still something crucial about color vision that Mary does not know: what it is like to experi-ence a color such as red. It follows that there are facts about conscious experience that cannot be deduced from physical facts about the functioning of the brain
One follow up question that I would have is that if it were possible for Mary to both know which neurons fire as a response to seeing red and stimulate her neurons in such a way that she could cause the experience of seeing red, would that still count? She would have never actually seen a red object but she would know how it feels to see red purely by understanding and manipulating the brain's functions.
For many years, consciousness was shunned by researchers studying the brain and the mind.
My main question then would be how did the scientists justify the subjective experience of the mind without allowing for some sort of consciousness.
“the ghost in the machine.”
This quote reminds me of the Ghost in the Shell series, both due its similarity to the title but also the similarity of the premise. While a bit different than having a spiritual substance controlling the body, the whole premise of Ghost in the Shell is that the main character, Major Kusanagi, is just a cyberbrain (the metaphorical "Ghost") that controls a cybernetic body (the metaphorical "Machine").
I believe that none of those objects which my fallacious memory represents ever existed;
This further explains what some other students mentioned about the prior sentence, memory is fallible and easily warped so, without external proof, one cannot be sure anything that is remembered actually happened.
mummery
But the scientist would be aghast if, before he used a microscope or a telescope, he had to settle the question whether knowledge was possible through per-ception, or whether there could be a logic without ontol-ogy.
This reminds me of the concepts of axioms in Math. There are some fundamental things that cannot be proven so they need to simply be assumed to be true in order for the rest of Math to work.
I wonder how this aligns with the earlier quote from the article that states that philosophy is made up of questions with no definite answers.
consciousness . . . and in particular the capacity to feel pain
I wonder why Warren specifically mentions the capacity to feel pain as part of this. It mainly made me think about the potential of an artificially intelligent being that fulfills the rest of the criteria but the designers elect not to equip it with the necessary sensors to feel pain, would it not count as a person in the full-blown sense? Furthermore would the pain requirement imply that people with congenital insensitivity, and thus are physically incapable of feeling pain, only a person in "some sense" rather than the "full-blown sense" of person-hood that Warren states the traits comprise.