On 3/13/2015 10:06 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 5:44 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 3/13/2015 12:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 1:25 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 3/12/2015 1:21 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Not me. I'm the opposite, I was always confused by the idea that rocks
are not
conscious.
If you ever have an operation, I suggest you check to see that your
anesthesiologist is not confused.
There's maybe a difference between being a conscious entity and being
conscious of
something.
Telmo.
So you think you could be conscious without being conscious *of* something?
I'm not sure, as per my response to Bruno. But this is not what I meant to suggest here.
My argument is simply that anaesthetics appear to allow one to not be conscious of the
external environment. We can only speculate if one remains conscious of some internal
environment.
That's just mystification. We don't "only speculate". We can monitor brain waves,
hormone levels, blood pressure, reflexes.
I say "appear to allow", because in fact there is only two thing we know for sure about
this:
1) one is not capable of controlling one's muscles
2) one is not capable of forming memories
There seems to be a lack of consistency on this list as to what or who "one" or "you"
refers to. On the one hand it's asserted that "one" is just a sequence of "observer
moments" or a bundle of such sequences. And there is always a "next moment" which is
determined just by which of the many observer moments is most consistent with the indicial
one. No one dies because there is, in everythingism, always *some* next moment. But in
that model there's no reason there should not be gaps, i.e. places where the next moment,
even the most consistent next moment, has discontinuities - i.e. you weren't just
unconscious, you didn't exist (relative to other more continuous sequences).
We assume and hope that:
3) one is not capable of perceiving the environment, namely the pain from the
surgery
Suppose there were such observer moments in which pain was experienced. If you formed no
memories, in what sense was it YOUR pain? This seems to invoke a magic spirit that links
the observer moments - exactly the thing that was supposed to be explained away.
But unfortunately we cannot be sure about 3). Some horror movie scenarios can
be true.
We can assume that there is a correspondence between consciousness and intelligent
action, but we re already on shaky grounds because of dreaming, as you mention. With
dreaming 1) holds but not 2). If states exist where both 1) and 2) holds, we have no
means to know about them for sure.
That we don't know something for sure, doesn't entail that we don't know it.
This leads me to my doubt about rocks beings conscious, that I had since I was
a little kid.
I think that's wrong and that's why I think consciousness requires physics
- dreams
not withstanding.
Or physics requires consciousness.
That's what Dennett calls a deepity. I've been unconscious several times in my life. Are
you proposing that the physical world was affected by this? Did the world cease to
exist? Or are you just referring to physics = the theory of how matter and energy work,
and theories are the inventions of conscious beings?
Brent
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