From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Apr 10 2000 - 20:33:34 MDT
Koan:
You know that when you see a book, you are truly seeing your visual
cortex. You know that when you touch and hold a book, you are truly
feeling your sensorimotor cortex. If you identify with your neurology,
you will imagine that the feelings exist inside your head, in the back
for the visual cortex, or along that center strip for sensorimotor
cortex. You can feel it in your imagination: The book exists inside
the visual cortex, which is *here* inside your head, and in the
sensorimotor cortex, which is *there*.
But you do not truly identify with your own neurology until you realize
that this spatial representation, this perception of location, itself
exists inside your parietal lobe - which is located at the top and back
of your head.
Now, quick: When you imagined that the spatial representation (of the
visual cortex and sensorimotor cortex) was inside the parietal lobe (at
the top and back of your head), were you imagining the parietal lobe as
being inside its own "meta-model" of the brain, or inside the same
spatial representation you were imagining the visual cortex and the
sensorimotor cortex in? In other words, did you imagine a spatial model
of the visual cortex and sensorimotor cortex contained in a spatial
model of the parietal lobe, or did you imagine a spatial model of the
visual cortex, sensorimotor cortex, and parietal lobe all contained in
said parietal lobe?
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
Member, Extropy Institute
Senior Associate, Foresight Institute
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