From: Jason Joel Thompson (jasonjthompson@home.com)
Date: Mon Dec 11 2000 - 13:21:15 MST
----- Original Message -----
From: <Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
> Emlyn writes:
>
> > Did your brain entirely stop doing anything?
>
> FYI, EEG collapses after few 10 s of stopped blood flow. After 30 sec
> you'll get essentially perfectly flat EEG. If you resuscitate at this
> point, things resume normal operation, the spatiotemporal activity
> attractors are quite stable.
>
> Thanks to modern medicine there are a lot of zombies out there.
This is what I consider to be the BIG issue for those who place importance
on a particular instance of a reality experiencer.
Is the dynamic pattern of a particular experiencer robust enough to bridge
these sorts of gaps, or is there an effective death of a subjective observer
in such a happening? Guess it might depend on how much of "us" is contained
in solid state-- however, I have to admit that my current beliefs
would -tend- to define a period of absolutely no brain activity as an
extinguishment event.
Obviously the result is not a zombie, but rather a re-iteration of your
consciousness running on the same hardware.
If this re-iteration is indeed possible (and is -really- what happens,) then
there's no good reason to believe that evolution should particularly "care"
about any particular instance of a reality experiencer (since it's
apparently not necessary for functionality.) From the perspective of an
external reality, the "truth" of this issue is 100% irrelevant.
Fortunately, however, we now live in an era of self-directed evolution--
internal states are suddenly important.
--
::jason.joel.thompson::
::founder::
www.wildghost.com
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