From: Mitchell J Porter (mjporter@U.Arizona.EDU)
Date: Tue Jul 31 2001 - 04:21:06 MDT
Well, I'll say one more thing ... The same argument
applies to all the senses. You can distinguish between a sensation,
as an object of awareness, and a sensation, as a neural event
which plays a causal role in the nervous system. They are correlated
somehow, and one might want to say that they are simply the same thing,
but we know no reason why being in a particular physical or causal
state should produce consciousness. Why can't all those causal chains
that we call cognition and behavior happen without any sort of
awareness, as if we were sleepwalking? (My answer to that would be
the anthropic principle: there may be possible worlds like that,
but we can never find ourselves to be in such a world, since,
by hypothesis, they contain no consciousness. But that doesn't
explain how consciousness works in *this* world.)
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