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Originally posted by chavos
why is it that a pattern can't be continous? I mean...we have brain waves, and they cycle through all sorts of patterns depenant on our mood, or if we're sleeping, with all sorts of variations and responses to stimuli.... but you define them as non-continous because the discharges themselves are transient.
yet you are willing to posit "memory" which is not transient, at least on some degree. well, what is memory if not a part of that pattern of electrical/physical activity of the brain?
why define a system that stores and processes information using electrical impulses as non-continous? talking about the transience of brain wave pattern, and then mystically defining memory seems like one hell of a logic jump. for instance, can you prove my computuer runs non-continously just because it stores data?
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I think you may have misread my arguement. The "pattern" does
cause consciousness, the point is, that it cannot be the cause of the
continuity of consciousness.
Bascially, think of it this way. Why do you percieve your "self" as being static...in the sense that you are the same "self" that existed a few miliseconds ago?
What links the "you" of now, to the "you" of the past?
What makes you, you?
It cannot be the specific particles that make up your body, as these are transient.
It cannot be the pattern that these particles make, as these too are transient.
So why do you percieve a non-transient self? There needs to obviously be a "link" of some sort to your past self.
Yuo are saying that it is because the pattern itself is continous. I'm not fully sure what you mean by this, but I assume that you mean in the sense that each "state" move smoothly into the next, passing through every intermidiate state, in a manner akin to a graphed continous curve?
Well first of all bear in mind that realaity is inherrently non-continuous. All states exist only in distinct quanta.
Secondly, even if these states were related in this manner, I don't see how it would affect my argument, which argues that the percieved permenance of self is an illusion.
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btw...you assume that in making an artifical brain, you can recreate all of its activity. that may well include "an operating system" of sorts...which many well be the continutity part of the equation. stored data + an interpretive method= intelligence.
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I don't follow this arguemnt?