::scr long waffley post about consciousness

[Piers Cawley]

Alaric Snell <alaric@alaric-snell.com> writes:

> On Monday 08 April 2002 14:37, you wrote:
>
>> If the soul is an emergent property of the whole, what happens when one
>> conscious form consumes another? One consciousness stops. The other
>> continues. As the soul is an emergent property of the whole, the soul is
>> now an emergent property of the new whole.
>>
>> So how come I don't turn into someone new when I eat chicken? Either your
>> conciousness is incapable of detecting changes in your soul, or your soul
>> hasn't changed, i.e. it's an emergent property of the *entire* whole, not
>> just you.
>
> This soul seems very brain-based. You can change anything outside
> the brain without much personality change (a few glands aside), but
> poke around in the brain and it's easy to change a person's
> personality (very very easy to convert them to a vegetable, but with
> care you can make subtle changes too...)
>
> So eating something would do nothing since the neural tissue of what
> you eat is not incorporated into your own. Indeed, what you eat is
> broken down to raw materials and new cells built from that.

Unless the thing you are eating contains alcohol. Or caffeine. Or
prozac. Or are just really well prepared and delicious, leaving the
eater feeling more contented (which is a change in their personality
after all).

-- 
Piers

   "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a language in
    possession of a rich syntax must be in need of a rewrite."
         -- Jane Austen?