Archive for category Philosophy

Thought ramble.

Apr 20

Posted by Innomen in Ethics, Fiction, Logic, Neurology, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology | No Comments

(Perspective disclaimer.)

Anyway… The human body is a space suit for the brain. A way for the brain to link to the world yes, but primarily a way to survive in said world.

There are three ways to expand your sphere of influence in this context. To adapt the environment to yourself, find an environment already suitable and travel there, or adapt yourself the environment. Everything that has meaning about a person is in the brain. I am firm on that point. I am not my arms or legs or liver, but I most definitely am my memories, my feelings, and my experience. The only reason my body is remotely me is because what is really me extends into those things. My nerves.

Ok so we can look at a person and we are so used to looking at people that we come to think that this is what people, which are brains as I just explained, look like. But what if another kind of brain evolved? What if other brains took different options? What would a brain in a suitable setting look like? What would a brain adapted for life on land look like? The answers are terrifying because these models of life aren’t fantastical or alien they are ubiquitous and completely disregarded at best or shamelessly exterminated or consumed by us.

Indeed I’m having the worry that intelligent feeling life on this planet might be more common than unfeeling life if you simply expand your scale a bit. I am not the first to have this idea. It’s in fiction everywhere. But this is the first time I thought about it from a purely anatomical perspective. If you hardened my neurons against the elements and made them more physically flexible, or maybe even blended them with muscle tissue so they could individually contract, what would that look like? A blob? A large moving mold? A jellyfish? And aspen grove? I’m looking around at my world from the brain’s perspective and I’m realize that half of what I see could be brains that have found various ways to dispense with their body.

What if the skull has cut us off? I don’t like where this is going.

As I’ve realized before the only thing special about us in this context materially is the ability to exit our biosphere completely. But what if that’s only because our condition leaves us totally blind to a far superior method of escape? What if the answer to the Fermi paradox is that radio is completely crappy as a communications tool, and that space ships or physical travel is an equally crappy travel mechanism? What if they are watching us for resurgence? Would you bother talking to an anthill? What if the thickness of the skull prevents reception? What if that’s why ancient cultures cut holes in their skulls and did other gruesome things to their heads? What if that is the real purpose of a crown? What if that is the source of power and divine right? What if that is how warriors came to be rulers again and again not because of the fighting but because of the head injury?

I’m tempted to not share these things since each would be a story idea maybe and I’m not supposed to share and I’m so powerfully broke. But whatever, I love writing and I love talking and fate has kept me alive so far. Failure to gain is not the same as loss. Maybe someone will help me.

Why study consciousness?

Mar 24

Posted by Innomen in Ethics, Neurology, Philosophy, Psychology | No Comments

Inspired by: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=H8Z3dR2BSyc

(I could do a post on virtually every statement and question in this video but my writing doesn’t profit me, and the world you’ve created requires that I seek profit. You people don’t even comment. So if you want more than the bare minimum I write to keep myself sane and entertained, help me to profit from my work, or share your profits with me.)

There are subjective answers and such but for me the best practical answer is that consciousness informs ethics. We don’t care about sawing a rock in half because we all agree it has no experience, no consciousness, no qualia. We care about sawing a kitten in half because it is not like a rock in this way, and a brief look at human monstrosity and the actions of sadistic psychopathy depends intrinsically it would seem on a situation where the object of torment is somehow down graded in only one universal way: Being less conscious. Being less human. Being more animal, or being more false.

So not only is the study of consciousness important, it is in what one might call the hierarchy of endeavors actually paramount.

For there are two axiomatic features to existence which give it “meaning” or “value” universally and those features are existence, and enjoyability, neither of which are possible without consciousness.

Assuming a rock doesn’t have an internal experience, then in a way that rock doesn’t exist. There is no experience/consciousness for “Mr. Rock” therefor there can be no existence and no enjoyment/suffering.

It’s a popular idea well explored in fiction that one must consider two things of any action, and one is axiomatically more important than the other: can we do a thing and should we do a thing. Understanding consciousness is the very foundation of how we determine what should be done.

One could very easily argue that the core problem with the world today is a pandemic lack of empathy, and what is empathy but the recognition of consciousness in others coupled with value for it? And could it not also be argued that this recognition is linked to degree of similarity assessment. Such as is lacking with the cliche racist idea (or with how we treat arbitrarily selected animal species) “well they don’t feel pain the way we(I) do.”

I think a system wind fascination with this idea is part of our fascination with zombies. Zombies are humans minus experience, freeing us from all constraint that awareness of secondary experience bounds us to.

So to sum up the study of consciousness is the very core of what it means to be human if you define human in the same sort of sense as you define what it is to be humane.