X-Message-Number: 4070
Date: 23 Mar 95 09:42:51 EST
From: "Steven B. Harris" <>
Subject: CRYONICS: Self-circuits

Dear Cryonet:

   Once again you guys are after a definition for consciousness
as a binary thing, on or off.  But let me propose, as in the case
of identity and life itself, that you may not have such a "thing"
in reality.  I suspect that "consciousness" is an emergent
property of complex adaptive systems, a fuzzy concept and a fuzzy
reality.  

    I infer (though Descartes would not have agreed) that a dog
is conscious, the same way I do another person-- I watch the 
behavior, I look into the eyes, and it appears that there is
"somebody home."  After spending a lot of time with a dog, I can
imagine (I think) a bit of what it must be like to *be* a dog,
sometimes.

   But the problem is that there is no dividing line, all the way
down.  Mammals are conscious.  Probably insects, although the
compound eyes do tend to start to mess up my ability to infer
mental state.  With diminishing complexity of the nervous system
I soon lose the empathic feeling for what it must be like to be
an organism, but I don't imagine that this represents some kind
of objective qualitative change.  Verily, if you have a fine
microscope and watch a flexible paramecium nosing and exploring
about something on a glass slide, and then "frantically" trying
to find a way out of a shrinking bubble of drying water, it's
almost impossible not to imagine that there is some kind of
awareness there.  Certainly there is a lot of signal processing
going on, on the cell membrane of a stressed animalcule.  A big
ciliated protozoan is sort of one giant neuron, and it gets a lot
of processor bang for the buck.  It's alive, irritable, active,
*thinking* in a small way, using some kind of interplay of
subcellular component workings to do its "mental" business.  I'm
not going to imagine some indivisible a-tom of consciousness,
consisting of a "circuit."  A circuit of what?  Two-neuron
creatures might be conscious (but dim bulbs), but one-neuron
creatures are just mechanisms-- automata?  

    Brian (forgive me if I misrepresent him) is trying to creep
up on this sorites paradox from the other direction, the one
called "Theseus's ship."  If I replace one board, do I have the
same ship?  Two?  Three?  There is no clearly conscious creature
that I cannot make into a clearly unconscious creature with an
infinity of small steps, such that you cannot draw the line in
any rational or natural way between.  Not if we work with
ordinary materials.  You really must posit some metaphysical
essence (i.e., what binary types do, when faced with fuzzy
problems) to make such a line.  I'm not a fundamentalist, and I
don't feel the need to do that.


                                     Steve


P.S.  To Dave C.  If I *really* wanted to take risks I could
build a cryonics nursing home, get a bunch of moribund people in
there who are going to be frozen, staff it with folks who don't
know much medicine, and wait for the deaths, disasters, and the
angry families and accusations of hidden interest.   That will
draw coroners like flies.  What do you think?   Are you guys
really conscious down there?

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