Spirits (was RE: [extropy-chat] Qualia Bet.)

[The Avantguardian]

--- Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:

> Then does "qualia" substitute for what is probably
> due to different  
> internal experience as we can't explain the observed
> difference by  
> studying externals?
>Are all such things "qualia"
> in your  
> thinking?

Well I am admittedly out of my depth discussing qualia
but based upon the thought experiment posted earlier
about Mary the sensory deprived "color scientist", I
guess that is how I interpretated "qualia". To be
honest though, anything that truly has no external
measure is not amenable to scientific explanation and
must be relegated to the philosophers. Of course there
might be a yet unknown external measure of qualia.
Perhaps something like the Voigt-Kampff test from
Phillip K. Dick's D.A.D.O.E.S. aka "Blade Runner".
There is some folklore that contends that the pupils
of people viewing something that interests them dilate
and conversely their pupils contract when they view
something that they don't like. Perhaps this might be
a way of quantitating qualia. If a person's pupils
dilate when they see red, they like red. If a person's
pupils contract, they don't. Problem is it seems that
most people's pupils dilate when they see red so it
must be a pretty popular color. Of course this might
be a mere hold-over from our hunter-gatherer days when
red meant a tasty fruit and have nothing to do with a
person's actual color preference. I would be
interested in comparing homosexuals and hetersexuals
in this way using a pupilometer and pictures of
scantily clad specimens of both sexes. But alas, this
is not something that I am at leisure to pursue
currently.     

> I would think a bit of chaos theory
> would go a  
> considerable ways to explaining such differences. 
> Before even  
> pulling that out of the toolkit it impossible for
> even the brains of  
> identical twins to be identically wired at birth
> much less to give  
> them both identical experiences.

You are most likely correct on this.

> >> Also I wonder why you are defending elan vital.
> >>
> >
> > Probably because somebody worthy of disagreeing
> with
> > is attacking it. ;) Plus it truly hasn't been
> > disproven, it has only lost popularity.
> 
> Trouble is that it never got any proof and
> increasingly became an  
> unnecessary hypothesis.

I hate to dredge up old unpopular references but I
still am intrigued by MacDougal's "soul weight"
experiment aka "21 grams". I mean sure most people
DON'T take it seriously, but he WAS a medical doctor
and therefore not necessarily an idiot. To call him a
fraud without having actually met the man could be
unfair, to say the least, since he is dead and can't
defend either his research or his character. I would
sincerely like to see such an experiment repeated with
the more sensitive balances afforded by modern
technology. Better yet I would like to die in the
detection chamber of CERN or one of the other particle
accelerators (when my time came of course). This would
be a superb way to test if there is any form of
measurable energy representing consciousness released
from the body at the moment of death. Of course being
dead, I would probably never know the results but I
don't think there would be a lot of other volunteers
for this sort of thing.

 

The Avantguardian 
is 
Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"If you fear death, you are not living right; if you don't want to live forever, you are not living well." - a sparrow outside my window.


		
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