Re: Pareto laws and expected income

[Russell Standish]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 10:43:50AM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
 On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 12:01:16PM +1000, Russell Standish wrote:
  The alternative is that consciousness is a continuous property (or at
  least finely divided miltivalued), argued by people like Susan
 
 ..and by all of critical care medicine.
 
 
 http://www.google.com/search?num=100hs=aXMhl=enlr=safe=offc2coff=1client=firefox-arls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficialbiw=1172q=critical+care+level+consciousnessbtnG=Search

I did the Google search, but unfortunately I'm none the wiser as to
how critical care spcecialists uses the term. However, I woudl wager
that it is a 3rd person term, referring somehow to congitive ability,
not a first person term meaning being aware of oneself and the
surroundings.

At least Greenfield is supposedly talking about the latter. It doesn't
sound right to me.

 
  Greenfield. This doesn't seem right to me. For one thing, this is not
  how the term is used in everyday language - you are either conscious
  or unconscious. I haven't seen one whisk of evidence that this naive
  folk approach has got it wrong.
 
 You aren't serious, are you? Common sense completely fails most of science.
 

Sure. But until the folk meaning of the term is shown to be
inconsistent or meaningless, it is viable to use it. Science has
a (sometimes annoying) habit of borrowing everyday terms and changing
the meaning, which is quite likely in the case of critical care
medicine (or in anaesthetics for that matter).

Cheers

 -- 
 Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a
 __
 ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820http://www.leitl.org
 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE



-- 
*PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which
is of type application/pgp-signature. Don't worry, it is not a
virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this
email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you
may safely ignore this attachment.


A/Prof Russell Standish  Phone 8308 3119 (mobile)
Mathematics0425 253119 ()
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
International prefix  +612, Interstate prefix 02



pgpfE4ecv1h2V.pgp
Description: PGP signature

RE: Pareto laws and expected income

[Jonathan Colvin]

   (JC) My consciousness (or degree of such) is a 
 complicated function 
   of my evolutionary history, but the problem is so multifactorial it
is 
   inappropriate to use anthropic reasoning.
  
  Nonsense. You are either conscious, in which case you will observe 
  something, or you are not, which case you don't. This is a 
 simple two 
  state logic.
  
  That seems a remarkable assertion. As I grow from a fetus 
 to an adult, 
  is there one particular interval of planck time where I go 
 from being 
  an unconscious object to a conscious observer?
 
 It is unlikely to be resolvable to the planck scale, but I do 
 expect there to be a first observer moment (ie resolvable on 
 the millisecond scale). It may not be possible to pin down 
 exactly when this occurs with human beings, however, just as 
 it is extraordinarily difficult to draw a dividing line 
 between conscious animals and unconscious ones.

Likely because there *is* no dividing line. Why would you think that
consciousness / observerness is a two state property?

Jonathan Colvin