On 8/14/2014 4:58 PM, LizR wrote:
On 15 August 2014 06:51, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 8/14/2014 6:45 AM, Pierz wrote:That is a weird assumption to me and completely contrary to my own intuition. Certainly a person born and kept alive in sensory deprivation will be extremely limited in the complexity of the mental states s/he can develop, but I would certainly expect that such a person would have consciousness, ie., that there is something it would be like to be such a person. Indeed I expect that such a person would suffer horribly. Such a conclusion requires no mystical view of consciousness. It is based purely on biology - we are programmed with biological expectations/predispositions which when not met, cause us to suffer. As much as the brain can't be separated completely from other matter, it *does* seem to house consciousness in a semi-autonomous fashion.So how did you suffer in the womb?But there's a lot of environmental interaction in the womb. You're undercutting your own case! To do a 180 degree, it would make more sense to claim that consciousness requires an environment because even before we're born we're already getting plenty of stimuli.
A fetus does get some environmental interaction, but I don't see how that proves it is necessary. It might be interesting to look at those few sad cases in which women have been in a coma during the latter part of their pregnancy. Presumably the fetus would have received less stimulus although there still would have been some and it would be hard to tell whether a recently born baby was more or less conscious.
You need to imagine a person put into an artificial womb with no light or sound etc from the moment they start to develop a nervous system, and consider whether that person would be conscious.
I think they would be severely deficient. Remember I think there can be degrees of consciousness, while Bruno thinks it's all-or-nothing. I think that even a "wolf-child" that grows up without learning speech has a qualitatively different and lesser consciousness.
I think we have some empirical evidence. If kittens are raised in complete darkness they don't develop vision.
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