Hi Brian, Telmo and others,
On 21 Sep 2015, at 02:49, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi Brian,
That's an interesting question. My take is this: I think trying to
understand that experience is like trying to understand what it
feels like to be an amoeba. It's just too alien.
I am not sure. I can imagine an amoeba having "proto-feeling"
comparable to ours. An amoeba or a paramecium might feel something
like some urge to find food when hungry, some urge to find a mate,
some urge to build a kist due to pollution, ... A monocellular
eukaryotic organism is a cell playing the roles of liver cells,
digestive cells, skin cells, neuronal cells, muscular cells, etc. In
the case of paramecium, this is more or less confirmed by the
molecular structure of the cells, in which key molecules playing the
corresponding role of each organ can be found. In particular we can
anesthetize a paramecium, we can block its locomotion with inhibiters
similar to what can inhibit our muscles, etc.
(Note that muscular and neuronal key molecules of that type have been
found at the base of the roots of plants too, and we can indeed
anesthetize plants).
The only difficulty for us to imagine what is like to be an amoeba
might comes when it divides itself, but then in this list this should
no more be a problem (except for Clark and Peck I guess).
But this does not solve Brian's difficult question. A human totally
deprived of an environment would be more like an encysted amoeba,
never going out of its "egg" (cyst), I think its consciousness might
be similar to the consciousness of the virgin machine (the non
programmed computer), which I think is similar to the consciousness we
can have during some phase of sleep or with some drug (notably
salvia). That is a consciousness state that we can hardly conceive,
because it is not time-related, nor space-related. To imagine it, some
thought experience can be given, but they will have to contain "total
amnesia", and even this will just be a sort of approximation. In fact
such a state of consciousness, even when lived, are not strictly
speaking memorable. If some theories are correct, the feeling can be
like an "home feeling". It looks like some people getting at that
state describe it as the usual, normal consciousness when in absence
of any hallucination: it is being like "you" before you begin any
differentiation. Even among those who describe it as "home", some are
quite positive about it (like bliss) and some are negative about it..
Note that people doing deprivation of input experience in talk
deprivation, are actually trying to get closer to such state (and some
claims to have found it in that way).
Now, it is only recently (well since 2008) that I think that all
universal machine are maximally conscious, and why that sort of "blank
state", when given information/input, is somehow distracted, and will
confuse that "out-of-time" consciousness with its growing content. If
such state was too much easily accessible, we would get in there when
we have problem, instead of solving the problem, and probably accept
equally to eat and to be eaten, which is a good state at the end of
life, but handicapping when young where we are supposed to take life,
and its information flux, very seriously. We forget quickly our
nocturnal dreams for probable similar reason.
We have some clues. For example, it is known that if children don't
learn a language until a certain age, they become incapable of
learning a language forever. There are some instances of this, with
children being raised by animals in the wild.
I believe we depend on a lot of information that is encoded in the
environment to become human. What you describe would be a life form,
but not human as we understand it. A developing brain is capable of
growing into what we understand to be a human brain, but not by
itself.
"Humanness" is encoded in the environment, it transcends single
bodies or what DNA can encode by itself.
I agree with this and what the others said. If you are never feed any
input, you are in the state that "you" had before birth, and with some
luck, after clinical death (when you don't backtrack on different
continuations, if that is possible, as plant and experience reports
suggest to be possible). It is not a human state of mind.
To be honest, I have done a simplification here, as a fetus *might*
have preprogrammed human experiences and skills. Babies seem to be
able to swim and walk immediately after birth (like horse), but
quickly forget those skills (and perhaps associated experience) to
learn them again through the try and error typical way for baby to
learn (unlike horse who will just walk instinctively). So, a real
human born in a deprivation tank might have some experience, due to
the fact that it has some brain, will get food, etc. he will have the
sleep phases, and might dream that he is hungry for example. I doubt
that he will be able to imagine colors and shapes, though. (To be sure
I read that some people born blind did saw color when taking some
drugs, which is not so hard to conceive, as color might be partially
preprogrammed in the brain too). But the reports might be fake, and
that might be circumstantial, and my answer is on the principle, not
in practice, where such an experience would be ... inhuman to do.
Best,
Bruno
We are not human beings having from time to time divine experiences.
We are divine beings having from time to time human experiences (de
Chardin).
Telmo.
On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 1:21 AM, Brian Tenneson <[email protected]>
wrote:
I wonder what would happen to someone's mind if they were born in a
white (or any color) isolation tank. What would happen as years wore
on? Would the person ever hallucinate anything? It has only seen the
tank for his whole life. So what would inspire him to hallucinate
something? Can he hallucinate, say, a friend staring at him from
across the void without ever seeing a friend or anything for that
matter except the white isolation tank. Would he dream and what
would he dream of? Would dreaming become one with waking? Would he
even know what a dream is? He has never heard the word "dream"
spoken out loud. But he knows which worlds decay faster or are more
"curvy" in the world-line sense: dreams decay faster or are more
"curvy" than waking events. So, locally, we usually know when it's a
dream. When the event world-line is straight, that means we pretty
much never know what is a dream and what is "real"?
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