From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Wed Aug 02 2006 - 21:42:35 MDT
>I also wonder if one could split a single hemisphere into smaller
>components, teach each component to communicate, and manifest a
>multitude of independent consciousnesses
Without going to extremes of sub-division, it's arguable that this is
what we do routinely in modeling the people we know best. Maybe those
models, with their idiosyncratic quirks, are both distributed and
overlapping (making repurposed empathic use, obviously, of one's
self-understanding and rich internal model) but the effect seems
similar. At the extreme it probably explains dissociative
personalities. My father had affecting and informative conversations
with my mother after she died; he was clearly accessing his internal
model of her, established over decades.
The splitting idea is explored fictionally, FWIW, in Walter Jon
William's best sf novel, ARISTO, and in several books by Alexander Jablokov.
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:57 MDT