What you say makes sense, and I'm sure you're right about the fragility of the brain. But what are your thoughts on the following thought experiment?
You take brain A and you duplicate it, atom for atom to brain B. Both brains are the same. Brain A is still being controlled by person 1, but who is now controlling brain B? As external observers we might see them as the same person in different bodies, but from the inside looking out they must see each other as distinct people.
Both brains think they were the original person but be separate people at the same time? In the flesh is everything model this would be possible, but in the interaction model the second person would never be able to "boot up" so to speak, the body would just be hardware with no software.
"Do you think that non-living objects move through space by teleporting from discrete coordinate to discrete coordinate? I guess I could see how Zeno's arrow could seem profound to a stoner contemplating the process of division, but it never struck me as an interesting parodox."
I'd never heard of Zeno's arrow before, thanks, interesting link. I don't think living and non living things would move differently to each other. I think we'd both agree that living stuff is made up of inanimate material. Where inanimate objects exist at discreet times and places consciousness, being a process, seems to only be able to exist over a range of time. For example memory seems to an important part of consciousness, and memory only exists over a period of time.
It's interesting to treat time as just another spatial dimension. What effects could that have on consciousness? Is consciousness only possible with the arrow of time pointing in a single direction?
Nervous tissue isn't viable for transplantation because surgeons don't know how to create viable synaptic junctions. Its shelf life is as pathetic as the shelf life of the transplantable tissue found in the liver. We shouldn't conclude that a substance is animated by ghosts merely because it's fragile.
Right. I hope you weren't thinking I was implying that ghosts were driving the process of consciousness. I was more alluding to the fact that consciousness might not be a result so much of organ x and cell y but more of an overall process and interaction between the physical parts that make us up.
Consciousness is unlike most physical phenomena in that it seems to only exist through time, but doesn't make sense to exist at any point in time. Everything else seems to be like a motion picture, things that happen at discrete intervals.
Or maybe my brain just can't detect that it's operating at slightly better than 24 frames a second, and therefore fooling me into thinking I exist through time. Interesting topic anyway...
Most people lose and regain consciousness on a daily basis.
Right, but losing consciousness is not the same as the state of zero electrical activity. Obviously, while asleep, the brain keeps ticking over.
Yeah, maybe it's the product of its parts. Wait, what units were we adding or multiplying?
Body units of course;-) It's all adding, in the end.
Good point, but consider organ transplants. Individual organs can be used long after it has become impossible to revive the person who used to be comprised of those parts. They can sometimes get everything going again, but with the consciousness lost the body is referred to as a vegetable - brain dead.
It seems that the persona is more than the sum of it's component part.
"Er? Biological systems are tricker to repair and restart after catastrophic failure than a car engine, ergo consciousness has to have some additional component?"
I didn't quite mean that, I was more aiming for consciousness as a waveform - generated by the firing of millions of em pulses within neurons. Every input to the consciousness changes that waveform, which is kept in a state of permanent prorogation while there is energy being pumped into the brain. When the brain stops then that complex waveform is lost, and although you might be able to restart some of the subsystems such as organs for an organ transplant, restarting the consciousness has remained to this day impossible.
Now if you can store that waveform somehow and then use that image to reload the consciousness of a given person into their newly renovated body is a very interesting question. Perhaps one that we can come back to when our understanding of quantum mechanics is a little more comprehensive. It may turn out to be impossible just because of the limitations of the physics.
"And true, dualism kind of feels right; it can't just be some dumb electrochemical process going on inside our heads truely "experiencing" being us, there's got to be some extra spark which seperates us from that, because, damnit, I'm here! Experiencing stuff!"
There is also the fact that when you take a dead person and remove the thing that was making them dead, say it was that they had no blood in their system or a blocked pipe, when you put them back together and press the power switch they don't start up again. Machines that run on deterministic principles like car engines will happily spring back into life once that blocked pipe has been cleaned.
This does suggest that conciseness is more than the sum of it's parts. It seems to be a four dimensional phenomena. A process.
You raise an interesting question: Memory, do brains organize material to reflect memory in a universal way, where you could take any brain and download some memories into another brain, or is it more like each memory being built up of other memories? Are memories stored in physical space like they are on computer media or paper documents, or do they only exist as a semi permanent standing wave of electromagnetic forces?
If personality and memory is basically an em field why can't it propagate outside of the body?
"At least for me, my brain expects the rest of the sentence to make sense based on what I've read so far."
My brain auto-corrects. Does anyone else get that? I didn't even notice the said error until it was illustrated. So I don't get thrown off by little mistakes, but I did realize that overall the article was a waste of time.
Only on Slashdot could a summary of an article be marked as informative. After all we're supposedly discussing the article, right? But thanks for your post, the fact that no-one had bothered to read or listen to the transcript was pissing me off too...
I thought he might have been referring to if there is interference with the signal. In analogue TV you just get a bit of static across the screen, with HDTV whole areas block up and become non viewable for a period of some seconds.
But if you trace back your time line you did press the button.
Starting where you sent the message, the time line of the message is
message sent ---> message received, because to the message it's arrow of time is still going forwards. In order to decide not to receive the message you would need to do that before you sent it, in which case you would never have received it, so you would not know that you could have received it.
The person who travels back in time still has his own time line that never actually goes backwards. He can remember every part of his journey in sequence. So traveling back in time might be more akin to creating new realities than actual travel.
The problem arises when someone goes back in time and changes something. Which version of reality do people experience? Go back and kill your dad before you were born. You still exist on a time line where your dad preceded you. But what does your mum experience? Simultaneous dad existing / not existing problems.
Only solution to that is to have another reality or universe spawn off at that point. In which case you're not really time traveling.
And then there's the idea that there is an equivalence between time and space as there is between matter and energy...
"5. Windows XP's habit of constantly reminding you that the computer needs to be restarted after an update. Memo to XP: I told you five minutes ago that I didn't want to restart, and I haven't changed my mind. How about you shut the fuck up, and when I'm ready to restart, I'll get back to you."
AMEN BROTHER!!!
It was only today I was thinking the exact same thing.
If everybody is in quarantine how are you going to buy milk to put in your double espresso? An everybody in quarantine solution would break down after about 5 minutes only because of the sheer impracticality.
Slashdot Mirror
What you say makes sense, and I'm sure you're right about the fragility of the brain. But what are your thoughts on the following thought experiment?
You take brain A and you duplicate it, atom for atom to brain B. Both brains are the same. Brain A is still being controlled by person 1, but who is now controlling brain B? As external observers we might see them as the same person in different bodies, but from the inside looking out they must see each other as distinct people.
Both brains think they were the original person but be separate people at the same time? In the flesh is everything model this would be possible, but in the interaction model the second person would never be able to "boot up" so to speak, the body would just be hardware with no software.
What do you think?
"Do you think that non-living objects move through space by teleporting from discrete coordinate to discrete coordinate? I guess I could see how Zeno's arrow could seem profound to a stoner contemplating the process of division, but it never struck me as an interesting parodox."
I'd never heard of Zeno's arrow before, thanks, interesting link. I don't think living and non living things would move differently to each other. I think we'd both agree that living stuff is made up of inanimate material. Where inanimate objects exist at discreet times and places consciousness, being a process, seems to only be able to exist over a range of time. For example memory seems to an important part of consciousness, and memory only exists over a period of time.
It's interesting to treat time as just another spatial dimension. What effects could that have on consciousness? Is consciousness only possible with the arrow of time pointing in a single direction?
Nervous tissue isn't viable for transplantation because surgeons don't know how to create viable synaptic junctions. Its shelf life is as pathetic as the shelf life of the transplantable tissue found in the liver. We shouldn't conclude that a substance is animated by ghosts merely because it's fragile.
;-) It's all adding, in the end.
Right. I hope you weren't thinking I was implying that ghosts were driving the process of consciousness. I was more alluding to the fact that consciousness might not be a result so much of organ x and cell y but more of an overall process and interaction between the physical parts that make us up.
Consciousness is unlike most physical phenomena in that it seems to only exist through time, but doesn't make sense to exist at any point in time. Everything else seems to be like a motion picture, things that happen at discrete intervals.
Or maybe my brain just can't detect that it's operating at slightly better than 24 frames a second, and therefore fooling me into thinking I exist through time. Interesting topic anyway...
Most people lose and regain consciousness on a daily basis.
Right, but losing consciousness is not the same as the state of zero electrical activity. Obviously, while asleep, the brain keeps ticking over.
Yeah, maybe it's the product of its parts. Wait, what units were we adding or multiplying?
Body units of course
Good point, but consider organ transplants. Individual organs can be used long after it has become impossible to revive the person who used to be comprised of those parts. They can sometimes get everything going again, but with the consciousness lost the body is referred to as a vegetable - brain dead.
It seems that the persona is more than the sum of it's component part.
"Er? Biological systems are tricker to repair and restart after catastrophic failure than a car engine, ergo consciousness has to have some additional component?"
I didn't quite mean that, I was more aiming for consciousness as a waveform - generated by the firing of millions of em pulses within neurons. Every input to the consciousness changes that waveform, which is kept in a state of permanent prorogation while there is energy being pumped into the brain. When the brain stops then that complex waveform is lost, and although you might be able to restart some of the subsystems such as organs for an organ transplant, restarting the consciousness has remained to this day impossible.
Now if you can store that waveform somehow and then use that image to reload the consciousness of a given person into their newly renovated body is a very interesting question. Perhaps one that we can come back to when our understanding of quantum mechanics is a little more comprehensive. It may turn out to be impossible just because of the limitations of the physics.
"And true, dualism kind of feels right; it can't just be some dumb electrochemical process going on inside our heads truely "experiencing" being us, there's got to be some extra spark which seperates us from that, because, damnit, I'm here! Experiencing stuff!"
There is also the fact that when you take a dead person and remove the thing that was making them dead, say it was that they had no blood in their system or a blocked pipe, when you put them back together and press the power switch they don't start up again. Machines that run on deterministic principles like car engines will happily spring back into life once that blocked pipe has been cleaned.
This does suggest that conciseness is more than the sum of it's parts. It seems to be a four dimensional phenomena. A process.
P.S. none of this is mystical... yet...
You raise an interesting question: Memory, do brains organize material to reflect memory in a universal way, where you could take any brain and download some memories into another brain, or is it more like each memory being built up of other memories? Are memories stored in physical space like they are on computer media or paper documents, or do they only exist as a semi permanent standing wave of electromagnetic forces?
If personality and memory is basically an em field why can't it propagate outside of the body?
"At least for me, my brain expects the rest of the sentence to make sense based on what I've read so far."
My brain auto-corrects. Does anyone else get that? I didn't even notice the said error until it was illustrated. So I don't get thrown off by little mistakes, but I did realize that overall the article was a waste of time.
Only on Slashdot could a summary of an article be marked as informative. After all we're supposedly discussing the article, right? But thanks for your post, the fact that no-one had bothered to read or listen to the transcript was pissing me off too...
Interesting use of the word "cool".
I thought he might have been referring to if there is interference with the signal. In analogue TV you just get a bit of static across the screen, with HDTV whole areas block up and become non viewable for a period of some seconds.
or you could say that it has been remade, it's called "The Matrix"
6. Profit!!!
Of course what Ridley Scott thinks is nowhere near as important as what Philip Dick intended, and he's unavailable for comment.
If it's any consolation your post is the only post in this thread I've found easy to agree with.
But if you trace back your time line you did press the button.
Starting where you sent the message, the time line of the message is
message sent ---> message received, because to the message it's arrow of time is still going forwards. In order to decide not to receive the message you would need to do that before you sent it, in which case you would never have received it, so you would not know that you could have received it.
Make sense?
The person who travels back in time still has his own time line that never actually goes backwards. He can remember every part of his journey in sequence. So traveling back in time might be more akin to creating new realities than actual travel.
The problem arises when someone goes back in time and changes something. Which version of reality do people experience? Go back and kill your dad before you were born. You still exist on a time line where your dad preceded you. But what does your mum experience? Simultaneous dad existing / not existing problems.
Only solution to that is to have another reality or universe spawn off at that point. In which case you're not really time traveling.
And then there's the idea that there is an equivalence between time and space as there is between matter and energy...
You haven't used XWM have you?
weren't they talking about the television series from the UK? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dwarf
"5. Windows XP's habit of constantly reminding you that the computer needs to be restarted after an update. Memo to XP: I told you five minutes ago that I didn't want to restart, and I haven't changed my mind. How about you shut the fuck up, and when I'm ready to restart, I'll get back to you." AMEN BROTHER!!! It was only today I was thinking the exact same thing.
But what about Ada? Or is that just dead, rather than dying?
indeed, you definitely need water.
Surley this is a English / Yankglish conflict...
Anything you can hear, you can copy.
If everybody is in quarantine how are you going to buy milk to put in your double espresso? An everybody in quarantine solution would break down after about 5 minutes only because of the sheer impracticality.