(June 29, 2013 at 7:44 am)Walking Void Wrote:(June 29, 2013 at 2:32 am)bennyboy Wrote: There are no studies which show which objects, brain, rock or otherwise, possess the quality of mind (i.e. sentience). What we have is the fact that we only know about mind through reports of language-capable organisms, and the set of such organisms consists of exactly one type of animal. But the fact that other things SAY they are sentient isn't really sufficient proof to prove that they are, IMO.
Maybe all matter contains a kind of atomic sentience, along with its other properties. This would explain how a mechanical structure, the brain, can magically create something not mechanical-- subjective experience: it doesn't.
But unfortunately my attempts to interview rocks only result in meaningful conversations when my own brain and mind are altered in interesting ways.
You realize that sentience is only 1 of multiple properties of a mind, yes ? Feeling alone does not constitute for the label of mind. Feeling is not measurable outside of a brain or better yet, nervous organism. We can see which parts of that brain activate under different feelings-related influence. You can test pain on plants and animals but if You subject a rock to trauma You will only find trauma because neurologically, the rock is absent. It has no nervous system at all. Does the rock die ?
How do you know anything feels? You correlate measured brain activity with reported speech.
So is the problem that there is nothing like awareness anywhere in the universe? Or is it that we are limited only to investigating organisms which either tell us they feel pain, or act in ways we recognize as pain behaviors?
Which is more likely-- that in all the universe, only the brain is capable of the kinds of self-referential processing that lead to subjective awareness-- or that informational complexity exists all throughout the universe, piggybacking on multiple mechanisms?
As soon as a species of monkey on a teenie little planet among billions of solar systems, in a galaxy which itself is one of billions, says, "It's all about me," then you have to wonder if the monkey's really grokking what's going on.
Ironically, this kind of anthropocentrism is very religious-sounding: "And so God made Man alone, in all the universe, and He made the universe so that Man could wonder."
Nah. I think it's more likely that mind is a function of processing, rather than any specific processing mechanism.
