From: Joseph Sterlynne (vxs@mailandnews.com)
Date: Tue Feb 29 2000 - 14:14:27 MST
> The study of consciousness is burdened by too much speculative
> philosophy, and not enough empirical science. It's important to observe
> real-life examples of many seemingly theoretical states of consciousness
> important for cryonics and uploading already exist.
There's no question that empirical science must continue to take topics and
problems away from philosophy. I disagree, though, with some of your
comparisons.
> 1. "zombies": sleepwalkers are nearly fully functional but not in an
> aware state of consciousness.
The metaphorical application of this term to sleepwalkers does not
necessarily have anything important to do with the term as used in
philosophy. In the literature [zombie] is used to refer to a theoretical
entity which, according to a standard-looking definition,
behaves like us and may share our functional organization and even,
perhaps, our neurophysiological makeup without conscious experiences or
qualia. (http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/Z.html)
It's referring to the basic design of a mind, not to a particular operation
of a conscious mind.
> 3. cloning of consciousness: experiments on split brain patients
> (slicing through the corpus collosum) seem to indicate that something
> like two conscious entities, one verbal and observable, the other
> nonverbal and difficult (but not impossible) to observe, exist in such
> people. This suggests that the boundaries between conscious minds are
> caused by the relative connectedness of the computing networks which
> create those minds.
I assume that you are comparing this to discussion about uploading, which
could be considered a sort of (mind-)cloning. That too is a very different
notion than split-brain surgery, which involves gross modification of a
mind. Simply the fact that some split-brain patients appear to have two
independent selves does not suggest a comparison to the multiple minds
resulting from upload procedures.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:27:06 MST