You are, of course, Correct, John... one can only strive to "meet" the Demands
of Necessity in ways that are Open to one... ("one must do what needs to be done
with the tools to which one has access)... it's a Sorrowful thing that there's
so-little that's Open... "just" This "Narrow Gate"... at least there'll be no
"shutting" it. Cheers, John, ken collins
John wrote:
> K C Cheng wrote in message <36464E88.3E11 at postoffice.idirect.com>...
> Savannah Hunter wrote:
> >
> > Savannah wrote:
> >
> > Is there an electronic device into which
> > I can upload and therefore preserve
> > my "conciousness", my "awareness
> > of my own existence" before I die.
> Re above:
> That's rather futuristic. Recording your brainwaves and memories in
> that way can be better done, I think, by preserving your own thoughts on
> videos, etc.
>> Can never happen. Uploading your consciousness is predicated on the notion
> that your consciousness is subject to laws which govern its very action. I
> don't believe this is true. Even if one could develop a model of human
> consciousness that was deterministic the problem is that the medium in which
> consciousness exists is not regulated with respect to those processes. ie.
> cells die, circulation\nutritional changes. As such, the stuff of
> consciousness is subject to actions from the environment which it cannot
> regulate.
>> Let's assume your consciousness was uploaded, the self that would evolve in
> this situation would not be the same self or consciousness that would occur
> in a messy wet brain. Divergence may be subtle at first, but eventually the
> the preserved consciousness would drift far away from the consciousness that
> would have evolved in a human body. (We're not even considering the effect
> of sensory and somatic input here. Consciousness in this sense is
> distributed throughout your whole body and possibly beyond. ) You cannot
> separate consciousness from the medium within which it operates for then you
> will create a new consciousness. And if you think about it, the idea of
> storing consciousness is a subtle dualism, as is the Platonic world view in
> a weird way (ie. mathematics = god = root of all stuff).
>> We are niether automatons or algorithms we are human beings.
>> John
>johnhkm at logicworld.com.au
