Re: The role of consciousness (Re: The GLUT and functionalism)

From: Stathis Papaioannou (stathisp@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Apr 11 2008 - 21:02:20 MDT


On 11/04/2008, Lee Corbin <lcorbin@rawbw.com> wrote:

> > Strange things happen when we grapple with
> > weird duplication scenarios using brains that have
> > evolved to believe absolutely that there can only
> > ever be one copy of us travelling forward through time.
> >
>
> But we "have been evolved" to believe all sorts of
> nonsense. We have been evolved to believe that
> for every inside there must be an outside. We have
> been evolved to believe that *down* is a particular
> universal direction in 3D space. The list is endless.

Perhaps it is better to say that what has evolved is a feeling rather
than a belief. I have the feeling that the floor is always down and
the ceiling always up, and my naive scientific theory to explain this
is that there is an absolute up and down in the universe. Then someone
takes me for a ride in a spacecraft and I have to admit that my theory
is wrong. But this has no impact at all on the fact that I get dizzy
if the floor and ceiling are constantly swapping roles, so I use my
new knowledge to request of the pilot that he accelerate in a constant
direction to restore the illusion of absolute up and down that my
brain is used to. It's the same with duplication: I know that both
copies have equal claim to being "me", but this doesn't change the
fact that it *feels* as if I become one or other copy with 1/2
probability.

-- 
Stathis Papaioannou


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