[ExI] Mental Phenomena

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Mon Feb 10 12:43:02 UTC 2020


On Sun, Feb 9, 2020 at 10:18 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> I'm having a hard time seeing all this as anything more than lots of
> hand waving, with an embedded "A miracle happens here".*


If you demand a total explanation of ANYTHING, not just consciousness, then
there always comes a point where you must say "a miracle happens here"
 because an infinite chain of "why" questions is not a total explanation.
But the simpler the miracle is the better the explanation, and that's why I
like data processing, things don't get much simpler than on/off. And feel
free to substitute "brute fact" for "miracle" if you like.

*> Our left hemisphere knows absolutely, that it isn't the only conscious
> hemisphere in existence, because it is computationally bound to the other.*


Yes the 2 hemispheres of our brains are normally computationally bound to
each other by the 300 million nerve fibers in the Corpus callosum, which
means that whatever one hemisphere knows the other one knows almost
immediately, and with communication that good it's meaningless to speak of
2 seperate individuals in our head. And yes I'm familiar with Roger
Sperry’s Split Brain Experiments, and they tell me that in a pathological
brain in which that all important communication link, the Corpus callosum,
has been severed the 2 hemispheres behave in ways very different from that
of a healthy brain. And that is not at all surprising, if you start cutting
transoceanic fiber optic cables the Internet would start behaving
differently too.

 John K Clark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200210/76c1e4e3/attachment.htm>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list