From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Fri Jun 21 2002 - 22:14:41 MDT
Mike writes
> > I don't think that you have any evidence that any human
> > being has ever hosted a separate sentient being or personality
> > after having watched a performance.
>
> MPS patients may have launched their personalities as simulations in
> their imaginations originally, but which somehow got user rights, or
> even root authority.
Many researchers believe that the whole MPS thing is a fraud.
Year after year CSICOP's Skeptical Inquirer runs articles
debunking it. Since MPS is not a verified phenomenon, your
speculation here is also imaginary.
> A being with awareness in an imagined universe doesn't need
> to be aware of this universe, of their user/imaginer.
Quite right. If we run a Life Board that hosts a intelligent
creature, or if we run a program that is conscious or intelligent,
it need not have any means of knowing of our existence.
> Our imaginations merely launch those universes.
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that a "universe" is ever
launched by an exercise of your imagination? Keep in mind
that your brain can in reality support only so much calculation.
Even if you are a tremendously skillful author, and have poured
a great deal of effort into fleshing out a character, that
character does not have an independent consciousness---that is,
a piecemeal examination of the brain of that author will show
only *one* consciousness. The purported character will be found
to be nothing but a bunch of visual and auditory fragments in
the author's imagination. Not a person at all.
> Characters within the dream may or may not behave according
> to our conscious will. What intelligence is directing those
> characters? What part of our brain is running them?
Good questions. I, too, am amazed at the seeming independence
of some of the characters that my brain produces when I'm
dreaming. Since sometimes they do think---or appear to think---
it's obvious that I am putting words in their mouths. What is
indeed astonishing is that I'm not conscious of doing so.
Well, people have been hallucinating since the dawn of time.
Some part of their brains indeed produce action and dialog
that they're not conscious of. (All being conscious of something
in this context means, of course, is that you later have verbal
access to the memory---and if the memory is blocked, or was
never transferred from short term memory to long term memory,
then it feels like you didn't do it.) But we have no evidence
that such a "person" has any kind of separate identity, or
"thinks" over anything but an extremely short term interval.
Lee
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