On Aug 31, 2004, at 6:47 PM, Alberto Monteiro wrote:
Warren Ockrassa wrote:Experimentally, there is no such thing as an "I": take a healthy person,
Keep in mind, that a sense of "I" is limited entirely to the "I".
No; it actually predicts "you" -- by distinguishing oneself from others, others must logically spring into existence.
That is, I don't think you can have an "I" in a vacuum. This means that
the presence of self-awareness, being almost by definition
other-awareness as well, changes how an I-conscious being behaves.
Gene-motivated actions aren't the sole deciding factor any more.
cut the brain in half, removing all communication between the two
hemispheres, and you end up with _two_ different personalities, each
one of them remembers being the former "I".
I seem to recall something along those lines, yes. Says something pretty interesting about the nature of consciousness. Mostly (I think) that it's not a constant state; that in order for consciousness to exist it must always be changing. Memory appears to give us a sense of continuity, but the process itself seems like soap in bathwater: The harder you try to get hold of it the faster it squirts away.
I imagine that if it were possible to keep cutting with surviving remains we would get other smaller versions of "I".
I'm sure you're correct. This is actually one reason I was so intrigued by _Kiln People_ -- a sort of energetic resonance being passed into clay, and then "inloaded" (before it had too much time to digress into its own consciousness) is an interesting idea. If you haven't read the book you might want to. ;)
It's why I don't really buy the idea of someone becoming "immortal" by putting his consciousness into a machine. There'd be immediate divergence which would only grow over time; in essence you'd have two distinct entities in very short order. (Oh, you could kill the body -- but that would end the distinct consciousness in the body. I don't think there's one "essence" allotted to a person, IOW.)
But my point was that in distinguishing oneself from the world, one has already defined the existence of a place called "the world" from which one is distinct, and any decisions one takes will have that in the account. So purely genetics-delimited behavioral definitions do not wash with me, especially where high intellect (primate, cetacian, possibly mollusccan) is present.
-- WthmO
There is no such thing as "mad vegetable disease." --
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