X-Message-Number: 23859 Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 10:22:59 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #23846 - #23855 Hi everyone! Some interesting messages by several participants. For Bob Ettinger: If you dismiss Goedel's theorem as "meaningless playing with symbols" you'll get a significant number of mathematicians disgusted with you. That may not really matter; however language itself is purely of symbols, and isn't completely shared by any other living creature on Earth --- although both we and most mammals do have a sense in which we can distinguish up to about 3 objects. This working with symbols has turned out to be very useful: if you have an actual physical awareness of just how many 100 billion or 100 trillion may be, a lot of people will get very interested in how your brain does it. This is not to say, however, as I pointed out in my previous message, that we should not test the results of our playing with symbols against our real experiences. Not to do this is REALLY meaningless playing with symbols. Trying to do such tests is science. For Dave Pizer: You don't get PERIASTRON so you may not know that scientists are right now attempting to work out, experimentally, just how our awareness works. They aren't doing philosophy, they're trying to see what circuits in our brain produce our sense of awareness. For what it's worth, so far such studies have not found anything like a separate awareness circuit. There are plenty of circuit loops that pass through different brain regions but all of which pass through one particular brain area. It is the circuit loop, not the brain area, which seems to play the major part in awareness. Such loops also pass through our different memory areas, too. Of what can we be aware if we have no memories at all (I mean NONE AT ALL, no cheating here)? Without our memories we couldn't even know how to look at anything, much less tell what we were looking at. If you're seriously interested in this kind of research I'm happy to send you some references privately --- plus copies of PERIASTRON articles on this subject. Best wishes and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23859