On 03-17-98 Relatif Tuinn wrote to Day Brown... 
 
 RT> Day Brown discussing "Consciousness & hell" with me... 
 RT>  
 RT>  RT>> Define consciousness.   
 RT>  DB> A system which experiences reality, stores that experience for  
 RT>  DB> retreival later [includes memmory], makes guesses about the 
 RT> likely  
 RT>  DB> effect of newer experiences [learns], and is aware of all of 
 RT> these  
 RT>  DB> processes as it tries to understand itself.  
 RT>  
 RT> So consciousness is an emergent quality of a complex self-interacting 
 RT> system.  
 RT> What is it though? You haven't defined consciousness  
 RT> itself, only the mechanisms that possess it. 
That which *experiences* is not exactly a mechanism. Perhaps this 
would be more clear to call it a piece of software that runs on a 
piece of hardware known as the mind. I spoze the atheist would be 
of the opinion that the mind is the *only* platform consciousness 
could run on.  I maintain that that is not so, although it would, 
no doubt, run somewhat differently. 
 
 RT> Plato may have suggested this but he has no basis of truth  
 RT> from which to make the assertion. Yes, the brain is a  
 RT> physical thing and memory may be stored in your brain, but  
 RT> when we die the brain reformats itself chemically and thus  
 RT> would destroy the data. 
You may see a lack of evidence, however, a human mind isn't the 
only memory storage method; indeed, we already use computers to 
store a lot of stuff we cannot remember.  What limit do you see 
to the development of this process? 
 
 RT> As to introducing the concept of a god that can somehow  
 RT> access this information and make it available to you and  
 RT> your friends when you have died is wholly unsupported. 
What is a ghost?  How do you prove that such a thing cannot be? 
If a thing cannot be detected with scientific instruments, does 
that mean it cannot exist?  If, thru meditation, or psychedelic 
compounds which both change the functioning of the brain, there 
are reports of supernatural phenomena, does that mean that this 
*experience* is *necessarily* false? 
 
The problem I see here is that experimenters are professionals, 
whose careers would be threatened by experimenting with methods 
of altering the consciousness.  So where is the unbiased person 
who will conduct these experiments?  Of course, some folks will 
not have anything like a supernatural experience, but OTOH, you 
cannot teach calculus to an orangutan either. 
___ 
 * OFFLINE 1.58 
--- Maximus 3.01
---------------