From: Patrick van den Berg (cirandar@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Nov 20 2005 - 20:39:51 GMT
Hi Scott,
Interesting position regarding consciousness. You say:
"QM shows that what underlies our perception of spatio-temporal things and
events cannot be understood as spatio-temporal things and events.".
When you further on say that the question of consciousness is or is not related to
space and time is a question of metaphysics, I cannot agree. You seem to be
advocating a particular radicular viewpoint of nonlocality. There are at least
three viewpoints of nonlocality.
1) All events (consciousness-events as well you might say) happen in space and
time, but with a certain amount of freedom/uncertainty.
2) All events do not occur in space or time at all. They come from 'somewhere'
else, a 'no-place' which can access time and space at essentially any point.
3) All events do not occur in space or time at all. Space and time are properties
of more fundamental physical ingredients.
You seem to be holding the third or maybe the second position, which maybe are just
two reformulations of the same viewpoint. To argue for any of these two you can
consider two particles flying from a common source; if they are entangled they can
remain so even if they are micrometers or even lightyears away. Distance doesn't
really seem to matter at all, and might therefore be secondary to the way the world
works.
Though it seems that these three viewpoints are just a matter of metaphysics, the
first one seems to me the most pragmatical. Consciousness has a certain freedom
beyond space and time but nevertheless is distributed primarily in mesoscopic
regions of matter, our brains, and hardly outside it. So if you stimulate the
sensory cortex with an electrode, a sensation is felt on the hand. With
transcranial stimulation of the right side of the brain, the raising of the left
hand is preferred by subjects when asked to choose voluntary either one of the
hands (or the other way around, I forgot). Future neuroscience will be able to
pinpoint conscious events in the brain with evermore precision. Do you really think
the possibility of having microchips of some kind in the brain interacting directly
with conscious processes is part of metaphysics? There are already blind people
seeing phonemes or lightspecks in their consciousness because of chips in their
visual cortex.
Don't you think that by identifying neurophysiological processes in the brain even
more, we can evermore freely manipulate conscious processes?
What do you do when someone tries to chop of your head with a sword? Do you just
think: hey, these are real sensequalia I'm perceiving relating to my perception of
space and time, but have nothing to do with my conscious processes as such because
they disregard space and time and so there's no real danger?
Don't get me wrong, I symphatize with your position because it's close to mine, but
I wonder how you would reply to such a simple question.
Cheers, Patrick.
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