From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Sat Jun 22 2002 - 19:56:42 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> 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.
Quite so. But then, imagination is the thing, isn't it? One thing I've
learned in life is that we make our own demons and angels, trials and
tribulations. What anybody else thinks of how we perceive ourselves is
really about as useful as a square screw.
> > 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.
Our minds are not expected to be matched for another decade or more by
man made computers. They are the paramount supercomputers of the day.
Looking at our minds thusly, rather than as the fallible, oft mistaken,
fanciful, emotive, irrational organs they are regularly ridiculed as,
leads one to the inescapable conclusion that if we are in a simulation,
or else an uploaded human mind is as good, and equal, as a living human
being, then our brains are evanescent generators of other universes.
Does a new universe collapse once you've been distracted or awakened
from the dream that created it? Likely not, though likely entropy within
it only progresses as you think about it, but this is a rather deep
question to ask, isn't it? And one which necessarily cannot be proven
yea or nay at this time.
> 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.
What is the source of your conciousness? Why is it that characters
within your dreams all act as very concious individuals, often with
wills of their own and beyond our control? They may all have only the
conciousness that our brains timeshared to them in the dream, but then,
where do we all get ours?
>
> > 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.
They have no separate identity within our universe. We have no evidence
that they don't have one in theirs.
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