[extropy-chat] I keep asking myself...

[Robert Bradbury]

On 4/17/06, Heartland <velvet977 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> No. I'm saying that the mind is a dynamic information processing. It's
> just physics
> and logic.


It isn't physics or logic.  Its a semantic claim on your part.  If you
assert that the "mind" is a dynamic information processing system which
ceases to exist when it ceases to be "dynamic" or "process information" that
is fine.  I would choose to assert that the "mind" is the information
content.

Straight from Wikipedia, "Mind refers to the collective aspects of human
intellect and consciousness that originate in the brain and which are
manifest in thought, perception, emotion, will, memory, and imagination."

These are individual and distinct aspects of a "mind" and there are
certainly physical accidents or drug induced conditions that can result in
the loss of one or more of these aspects.  When that happens most people do
not believe that the person has died.  I would assert that without the
information content that most of these aspects, excepting perhaps perception
and emotion, cannot be present.  So losing the information content
completely and utterly means losing the mind.

You seem to be asserting that a continued processing of information is
required for a mind.  Since  "mind" is such a loose term in the first place
it seems difficult to refute that.

But from my perspective...
   If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck -- its
a duck.
It doesn't matter whether or not its a duck that burst out of an egg and has
lived its life for a few years or whether I work very hard, as Tom Hanks did
in Cast Away, and at the end magically appears a "duck" (in Tom's case it
was fire).  Either path works for me.

"Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours."
   -- Richard Bach, Illusions

Robert
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