From: Randall Randall (wolfkin@freedomspace.net)
Date: Wed Jan 16 2002 - 13:18:29 MST
On Wednesday 16 January 2002 10:56, Dossy wrote:
> On 2002.01.16, Randall Randall <wolfkin@freedomspace.net> wrote:
> > > certainly the parts of the brain that deal with fear, love, pleasure
> > > and pain are very old; but it took another 400 million years of
> > > experimentation before evolution invented true intelligence and
> > > the creativity it produces.
> >
> > Response is not self-awareness. Having the chemical and physical
> > states that correspond to loving, fearing, and feeling pleasure and
> > pain does not make an animal a person, even though people also
> > have these states.
>
> By coincidence, do you believe that humans posess a soul?
Certainly not. I just think that it may turn out that awareness is both
a hard problem, and something that can be proven to exist or not
exist in a given (meat or electronic) machine.
> Otherwise, how can you say that the chemical and physical states
> are not sufficient to demonstrate self-awareness?
I'm not. I said that the chemical and physical states associated with
love, fear, pleasure and pain, specifically, don't seem, to me, to be
part of the core problem of what makes a person a person. I think
that the chemical and physical states that DO make a person a person
are probably not something that happens trivially whenever one gets
enough computing power, and probably not something that is easily
localized.
To be clearer, I think that awareness of self is a side effect of the
way other things are done in the brain.
-- Randall Randall <wolfkin@freedomspace.net> Crypto key: www.freedomspace.net/~wolfkin/crypto.text On a visible but distant shore, a new image of man; The shape of his own future, now in his own hands.-- Johnny Clegg.
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