On Aug 19, 2:04 am, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote: > What about the idea that a thermostat is conscious and feels hot and > cold in its simple way? How would you devise an experiment to prove or > disprove that?
If everything can feel everything in the same way, then the nervous system would be redundant. The existence of mammalian thermoreceptors suggests that the feeling of skin and muscle alone is not adequate to be perceived as what we know as hot and cold. The fact that a narcotic can mask pain subjectively without anesthetizing the local nocireceptors suggests that there is an interpretive sense required for 'us' to feel pain. Both the nocireceptors and thermoreceptors likely feel something IMO, but my hunch is, that since there is nothing they can do about it (ie, no motive power to alter or remove themselves from the stimulation as they might if they were freefloating microorganisms) I suspect their qualia is different at least in magnitude if not in significance. A piece of metal used to run a thermostat however, I would be comfortable in assuming it's qualia is quite considerably different from living tissue, nervous tissue, and entire systemic coordination of a nervous system organs of perception. Irrespective of quantitative volume or magnitude of the stimulus, it seems ludicrous to imagine that there would not be an extreme qualitative difference in the qualia. The function is different. A metal strip doesn't know it's part of a larger machine, it did not evolve out of a symbiotic relationship to that machine where it contributes survival-related messages to a greater body. The way to prove it is to build an apparatus which can directly add substances to the brain in a neuro-friendly solution, or indirectly through some kind of transcranial induction. Once you establish that your method works, by restoring sight to the blind for instance, then you can how other kinds of cells and substances feel to us within our brain. That would be the only proof. We would have to become the thermostat. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
