Consciousness Trilemma

[bennyboy]

The software distinction I mentioned comes about because of our inability to restart a dead brain. A dead brain probably retains all the neuron connections... it's just the signal patterns that have stopped (or so it seems).

Yeah, let's consider death by asphyxiation. Why is it that a lack of oxygen leads to such a permanent condition? Why can't we just filter someone's blood back full of oxygen and zap them? I'm pretty sure it has to do something with electrical potentials and materials crossing the cell wall-- i.e. you'd have to pump salts back into every cell to make it able to fire electrical signals again. But that's based on a 15 year-ago Neuropsych 101 course so. . .

Sure, the signals follow neural pathways that mostly get built up during childhood, strengthened during the teens years and then tweaked during adulthood... and each person has their own pov, so each person gets their own neural pathways, ever so slightly different from everyone else's... and that's enough to account for all of our different minds.

Yes. I'd add, though, that there is information carried into this system even before conception: DNA is normally seen as a formative code, but rarely viewed as a record of events, which I'd argue it is. In other words, even a new brain may been seen as the expression of software (i.e. functional ideas), not just as a material structure waiting to be fed a program. In other words, the brain is a carrier for a history of events, much as any given machine is a carrier for Windows, but is not really responsible for it in an ultimate sense. Windows needs a carrier, but it transcends the specific mechanism of whatever carrier it happens to find itself running on.

In Khemical's eliminativism, I'd go much farther than he has, and eliminate all the arbitrary divisions among discrete physical subsystems in the Universe, because there really is no such thing. There's no "input" and "output" anywhere, except in our conception of things.

Or maybe not. maybe those signals are just what arises from neurons doing their mostly predetermined job. I don't buy the QM uncertainty at the level of cells.... they're too big for QM to have a non-negligible effect.

Let's flip this and look for material structures capable of carrying "software." An atom is as empty, materially speaking, as our solar system-- its main existence is that it is a stable relationship among many QM particles, each of which has no volume. I'd describe an atom not as a collection of things interacting, but instead as an expression of the rules of interaction, if that makes sense. So the electrochemistry that allows for the brain is not really a property of organic materials except in a proximate sense.

I think it will be very hard to look at any particular subsystem in the Universe, and say, "This has the kind of information flow which allows for awareness, and that does not," except for the special case that we know about the brain.