On 24 February 2014 08:07, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > I wrote "no reason to assume" that consciousness is not the content of > consciousness. The premise I took is "everyone's on their first > consciousness". For which you offered the explanation of amnesia; and I > offered a different one. If you're going to criticize logic you need to > parse correctly. >
Sorry, Brent, but in this case you're the one who didn't parse correctly. I originally wrote... Or given that consciousness is not the contents of consciousness, does this just imply amensia about previous lives? (And maybe that "I am he as you are he as he is me", etc). Note that this is a single sentence with the structure - "Given that X, does this imply Y?" You interjected after the first half of my sentence: I see no reason to assume that. In other words, on any reasonable reading, you are saying you see no reason to assume my "Given that X" clause stated above. You then added, after the second half of the sentence: > Or does it imply that consciousness and memory are intrinsic to certain physical processes? This is clearly intended to be in response to my "does this imply Y?" clause - which was, as you can see above, predicated on my "Given that X" clause. Hence the only reasonable parsing of your responses was that you were giving an alternative conclusion to my "Does this imply Y?" which was based on my original "Given that X". Since you have already said you had no reason to assume X, it seemed odd that you were giving an alternative conclusion based on X. Which is what I said. Your comments about first consciousness, which wasn't attached to the statement you were (or appeared to be) critiquing, could only reasonably be taken as a standalone comment responding to my earlier comment, which it immediately followed. You may have thought your subsequent comments were predicated on it, but if you intended me (or anyone) to make that connection, you should have structured your response accordingly. It was your choice to interleave your response into a sentence I'd written, rather than putting it as a separate paragraph at the end, and the implication is clearly that that interleaving was necessary. Hence I parsed your comments as direct responses to the fragments you'd woven them around, which seems the only reasonable reading, given that you'd gone to the trouble of laying them out that way. > > But it raises the question, given complete amnesia and then growing up > with different experiences and memories in what sense could you be the same > person. I John Clark and Bruno's back and forth, the one thing they always > agree on is that as soon as the M-man and the W-man open the transporter > doors and see different scenes they are different people. > Yes, it does of course raise this problem, and I agree with you that this seems to stretch the definition of similarity to meaninglessness. For this to mean anything, one really requires some way for one stream of consciousness to segue into another, so that although the amnesia becomes complete eventually, there is a transition between the two. Or perhaps each stream of consciousness cycles back and forth between some tabula rasa state (assuming any of this has any validity at all, of course). Of course (as per the transporter) we also find ourselves in the position of Heraclitus' man entering the river, of a person being in constant flux in any case. This is a result of the idea of the brain being at some level a digital computer (and probably of it being an analogue one too...). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
