On 08 Feb 2013, at 13:45, Quentin Anciaux wrote:



2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com>



On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux <allco...@gmail.com> wrote:


2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com>



On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux <allco...@gmail.com> wrote:


2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com>

Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ?

Hi Quentin,

Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible.

Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments.

Fair enough, maybe it's my CS bias. But I'm still not convinced this is a purely technical issue. Can you conceive of any system that stores information in some coherent way that you can write to without reading?

Well, yes... with computer you could imagine doing just that... so why not ? Also, the fact that you can't imagine a solution yourself, doesn't mean there isn't one, lack of imagination is also not an argument.

I agree. This can happen in dreams. I have personally experience this a number of times, and I have read similar reports. Actually Louis Jouvet, the discoverer of the REM dreams, has studied that phenomenon, in the case of people relating simultaneous unrelated dreams, and he attributed this to the disfunctionning of the corpus callosum during the dream phase. It makes momentarily the two hemisphere independent. It looks like we can integrate different identities in different past. The result is a bit troubling ... unless we are already aware of the relative nature of personal identity. This happens also when using dissociative drugs. Of course, if Telmo wakes up with the memory of a cat experience, he will only access of the memory of cat + Telmo, which might biase the original experience of the cat, but not necessarily so much for a short period of time. This makes possible to conceive "waking up" and memorizing more than one past threads. If the many past threads are equivalently realist and coherent, it leads to a direct understanding of the relative nature of identity, and the possibility of sharing initial consciousness of ... who? I let you ponder on this.

Bruno





Regards,
Quentin



Regards,
Quentin

For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience.


Regards,
Quentin



And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,"I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world". The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might.

But is this really a case of "degrees of consciousness" or is it just the general property of "being conscious" instantiated in different contexts? The fact that you believe you can turn me into a cat seems to indicate that ultimately you believe that consciousness is all the same.


Brent

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