Brent Meeker writes:
> Consider a computer which is doing something (whether it is dreaming or > musing or just running is the point in question). If there is no > interaction between what it's running and the rest of the world I'd say > it's not conscious. It doesn't necessarily need an external observer > though. To invoke an external observer would require that we already > knew how to distinguish an observer from a non-observer. This just > pushes the problem away a step. One could as well claim that the walls > of the room which are struck by the photons from the screen constitute > an observer - under a suitable mapping of wall states. The computer > could, like a Mars rover, act directly on the rest of the world. The idea that we can only be conscious when interacting with the environment is certainly worth considering. After all, consciousness evolved in order to help the organism deal with its environment, and it may be wrong to just assume without further evidence that consciousness continues if all interaction with the environment ceases. Maybe even those activities which at first glance seem to involve consciousness in the absence of environmental interaction actually rely on a trickle of sensory input: for example, maybe dreaming is dependent on proprioceptive feedback from eye movements, which is why we only dream during REM sleep, and maybe general anaesthetics actually work by eliminating all sensory input rather than by a direct effect on the cortex. But even if all this is true, we could still imagine stimulating a brain which has all its sensory inputs removed so that the pattern of neural activity is exactly the same as it would have been had it arisen in the usual way. Would you say that the artificially stimulated brain is not conscious, even though everything up to and including the peripheral nerves is physically identical to and goes through the same physical processes as the normal brain? Stathis Papaioannou _________________________________________________________________ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
