Eric Baum wrote:
Josh> On Saturday 16 June 2007 07:20:27 pm Matt Mahoney wrote:
--- Bo Morgan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
...
...
I claim that it is the very fact that you are making decisions about
whether to supress pain for higher goals that is the reason you are
conscious of pain. Your consciousness is the computation of a
top-level decision making module (or perhaps system). If you were not
making decisions waying (nuanced) pain against higher goals,
you would not be conscious of the pain.
Josh> Even a simplistic modular model of mind can allow for pain
Josh> signals to the various modules which can be different in kind
Josh> depending on which module they are reporting to.
Josh> Josh
Consider a terminal cancer patient.
It's not the actual weighing that causes consciousness of pain, it's the
implementation which normally allows such weighing. This, in my
opinion, *is* a design flaw. Your original statement is a more useful
implementation. When it's impossible to do anything about the pain, one
*should* be able to "turn it off". Unfortunately, this was not
evolved. After all, you might be wrong about not being able to do
anything about it, so we evolved such that pain beyond a certain point
cannot be ignored. (Possibly some with advanced training and several
years devoted to the mastery of sensation [e.g. yoga practitioners] may
be able to ignore such pain. I'm not convinced, and would consider
experiments to obtain proof to be unethical. And, in any case, they
don't argue against my point.)
-----
This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email
To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to:
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=e9e40a7e
