X-Message-Number: 11718 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: to Daniel Crevier Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 23:46:52 +1000 (EST) For Daniel Crevier: First, apologies for getting your name wrong in my subject line and not correcting it. As for consciousness, we are not doing philosophy, we are doing science. Basically I agree with Ettinger here: it's quite clear that the ability to reason about one's thoughts is not necessary for consciousness. It's not even obvious that such an ability implies consciousness, unless we're extremely careful about our definitions. After all, the PC on your desk can be considered as reasoning about its thoughts, too --- and if you think it is conscious, then your notion of consciousness is so broad that discussion becomes impossible. I also notice that your idea of consciousness consists only of response of a brain to events inside it. That idea suggests that with no sensory input at all we might still be conscious so long as we knew what we were thinking. That seems to be false, as a matter of fact. If we're deprived of sensory stimulus, with go to sleep. Not only that, but it looks to me as an attempt to assimulate our thinking to that of a computer --- not something which is obviously worthwhile. And if you believe that a sequential computer might emulate a human brain (or even the brain of an octopus) then you need to think on that problem a good deal more. We're going to need a lot of parallelism, and no sequential computer, even one at the farthest reach of anyone's imagination, could work fast enough to emulate 1 billion neurons. But I may be attributing a belief to you which you do not have --- if so I apologize. Best and long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11718