[extropy-chat] Consciousness is a process in multi-dimensional time! [Was: Quali

Damien Broderick thespike at satx.rr.com
Mon Dec 19 22:27:43 UTC 2005


At 01:34 PM 12/19/2005 -0800, Avant wrote:

>At last his hand touched
>what he percieved as a cup on the ground. He picked it
>up and drank from it and the water was cool, soothing,
>and sweet. His thirst sated, he went back to sleep,
>gratitude in his heart.
>
>The next morning Won-Hyo woke up and saw beside him
>what he had taken for a cup the night before. It was a
>shattered skull, blood-caked and with tattered shreds
>of flesh still stuck to the cheek-bones and bits of
>brain still caked in its hollow

The trouble with this parable is that it's complete bullshit. Unless Mr 
Won-Hoy's senses were completely obliterated by his ordeal, he would have 
had absolutely no trouble in detecting the difference in smell, taste, 
texture, viscosity, etc between rancid blood and fresh water.

I can think of two instances where some version of this story might make 
sense, both involving trickery and subterfuge of a kind that renders the 
original parable meaningless or inverted:

Actually he drank the water, but the next morning it had been switched for 
a bloody skull by a trickster; or he was hypnotised into thinking that he 
saw, smelled, touched either the water or the blood.

I suppose there is another alternative: actually he had taken up a cup of 
watery wine, which was accidentally left there by a passing Christian 
priest after it had been consecrated into the sacred blood of Jesus Christ. 
Imagine how cross (no pun intended) that would have made both of them.

Damien Broderick 




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