On 3/15/2015 7:10 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 7:00 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 3/13/2015 10:26 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
or under anesthesia I'm not conscious
You can't prove that. That's an assumption.
That's logic chopping. There's a big gap between proven and assumed. In
fact all
of science works in that gap. It's called "knowledge" and it is provided by
evidence, not logic and not assumption.
I agree, "prove" was a horrible choice of words.
What I meant to say is that you can't test for consciousness. You can test for things
that you assume to be sufficient and necessary conditions for consciousness, but you
can't test this assumption itself.
Carl Sagan talks about the "dragon in the garage". I feel that consciousness is unlike
any other phenomena, because it is the "dragon in the garage" that we *know* is there.
Is that really so different from all the other things we know? I could be a
brain-in-a-vat, my impression I'm typing on a keyboard could be a hallucination, are there
*really* other people, perhaps this is a dream, am I really just imagining the world and
other people? For one reason or another we easily dismiss all these defeaters of
knowledge, but when it comes to consciousness it's suddenly different and we get radical
agnosticism - even though consciousness is by definition knowledge (of something).
Brent
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