h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/Nagel_Bat.html

Thomas Nagel's article on Consciousness. His thoughts are clear and raises the many questions that come to this question and its implications.

I dated a Cog Sci student at Uni, who introduced me to the "What is it like to be a bat?" question.

By the Summer I was wondering how she didn't know.

I know there's been some exploration of what happens in the brain when someone is lying. This would require acute awareness of self if controlled properly; to account for acknowledgement of the deceit, presumed believability, efforts to counteract physical indicators like sweating and shifting eyes. That sort of thing?

I'd say no chance.

Babies have to touch things for depth percetion to become part of the mental kitbag. We create a multiplatform model of our world and ourselves by interpreting each new experience against feedback from earlier experiences.

Everything has to have a foundation, a begining. Subsequently things can get more and more complex but a start is necessary. A nourished brain with no inputs would have literally nothing to go on.

Ask yourself these questions, how would you:

Be aware of heat without any skin with nevere endings

Tell shade and light from things that are simply lighter or darker, without eyes to see?

know what its like to be drunk without the feeling that the room was spinning while you can see it not spinning (or t'other way around) without also having experienced how it feels for the room to look and feel attionary?


People who take a acid a lot tend to have days off because after awhile the dellirious effect having things feel different wears off when you are tripping every waking moment...A friend told me...


Ive watched a lot of children and there is a lot of mileage in the sayings "Like father, like son" "That apple didint fall far from the tree", but Ive seen lot of children who I think would have turned out diffferently if they had been raised differently. There impression my sense give to me is that the genetics which are inhereted play a smaller role than the inhereted attitudes and behviours people get. Lets not forget in an average community many of the people you know will also know your older relatives and you will be expected to act like them.

The complex interplay of genetics and environment (meaning the fixed like mountains, transient, like rules and social mores and the random ones like the weather or lottery wins) can radically change peoples minds. Some people placed in hardship become defeatist and others develope a resourceful streak.

Leaving aside fiddles and such like its why people dont know which horse is going to win a race even though they have a lot of information on a short event with only a few competitors and one easily measureable outcome.

Whereas someone who lives in a world of six billion other people, for many years, with many conflicting goals to aim for, just how they will grow up, whether they will be hapy, smart, homicidal or gay is something we find very hard to pin point. Well I do anyway.

one love

"The first experiment involves patient GY, who has "blindsight" due to a car accident that damaged parts of his visual brain. This condition leaves him with the ability to locate a light or report the direction in which a bar is moving while denying having any visual experience; he insists that he is simply guessing. GY does not disappoint in this study: when asked to indicate the presence or absence of a faint, small grating on a computer screen, he does so correctly in 70 percent of all trials, far above chance (50 percent). Yet he fails to convert this superior performance into money when wagering; he places a high bet on only about half (48 percent) of his correct choices. When GY is consciously aware of the stimulus, he wagers high, much as you or I would. His wagering thus seems to mirror his conscious awareness of the stimulus (that is, his belief that he saw it) rather than his actual (unconscious) detection of the stimulus, suggesting that wagering may provide a means to measure awareness."

http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?cat=33

Plenty of other rather good food for thought at that site...

Blindsight is fascinating, I have to admit.
The study of human psychology through trauma is a very interesting one (being purely objective and unemotional here) although it does have the downside in that damage is usually not clearcut or precise so area effects can be seen but it is difficult to extrapolate to the larger population.

There's also the situations where the brain hemispheres have been disconnected as a treatment for epilepsy and you get the situation where you can show one eye one image and the other nothing and ask the person to draw what they can see. The corresponding arm will draw the object but the person will say they can see nothing. Assuming that the side that can see is not the side that controls speech.

It's also fascinating from the point of view of personal identity and personality. Damage to the forebrain can result in serious personality changes (Phineas Gage being the famous example) which then draws in the question of how physical our personalities are.

There does seem to be a very strong link between who we are and what our brains are like. The idea then that our consciousness is an emergent property of our neural connections seems to be a logical (although unproven - and proving emergent properties is quite difficult!) step which then means that our abilities and personalities are all down to how our neurons are connected. Hence the question that started all this!

BTW - Nagels stuff is interesting but would by implication mean that someone who was congenitally blind, or deaf or whatever, would have an experience of the world, would be a different 'thing' to someone with those senses.