Re: ::scr long waffley post about consciousness

[Alaric Snell <alaric@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.

> That leaves us with the idea that there is one soul, that is an emergent
> property of the entire system, and that each consiousness merely has its
> own perspective of it. A bit like the inverse of a hologram: (image real,
> object not) or (object real, image not)...

Wierd. Why?

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software