On 8/16/2014 12:38 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 15 Aug 2014, at 02:24, meekerdb wrote:
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.
It is all or nothing, but there is a variety of consciousness state. It is like being
positive, which is all-or-nothing, despite some very little positive real numbers can be
close negative real numbers.
You cannot be half conscious, you can be completely drunk, tough, and quite disconnected
from you mundane consciousness, and plausibly with a notion of numbness for such case.
Unconsciousness is not a first person experience.
So do you think my dog is conscious? The koi in my pond? The snails? The
algae?
Brent
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