On 2/3/2015 11:57 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Wednesday, February 4, 2015, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> On 2/3/2015 9:12 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
>>
>> Well the question "is something conscious?" is binary, like "is something alive?".
However there is a great spectrum of possible living entities, and a massive gulf that
separates the simplest life forms from the most complex life forms. I think the same is
true of consciousness. The mars rover might be conscious, but its consciousness might be
as simple as a bacterium's biology is compared to a human's.
>>
>> That seems inconsistent with being "binary", like "being alive". First, being alive
isn't "binary". Are viruses alive? Prions? Cigarettes?
>
> Any of those things are either alive or they aren't (according to some theory of
liveness).
>
> So you simply define "alive" to be all or nothing by invoking some "theory of
liveness" - however arbitrarily you have to draw the line. Not a very defensible position.
What are we arguing about? We both accept consciousness may come in many
different forms.
Alive / Dead, Conscious / Not conscious
It's like Positive / Non positive in regards to the natural numbers (non negative
integers).
A natural number is either 0 or positive. If a number is positive it says nothing of its
magnitude other than it is not 0.
So it is with consciousness. Do you agree?
No, because I don't think it's one dimensional. I think that there may be qualitatively
different forms of consciousness which will not be commensurable, that don't fit on a
single scale. Already the split brain person gives and example, half the brain is verbal
and constructs an inner narrative which is what most people think of as consciousness.
But the other half is aware of vision and identifying images and able to draw and
imagine. Is it as conscious as the verbal half? I don't think they can be placed on a
scale to compare them. They're both consciousness>0 but they lie on different dimensions.
Brent
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