[ExI] Quantum consciousness, quantum mysticism, and transhumanist engineering

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Sun Mar 12 20:58:24 UTC 2017


On Wed., 8 Mar. 2017 at 10:46 am, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Adrian wrote:  what the line is between sleeping versus a persistent
> vegetative state, and so on).
>
> Good - let's talk about sleep.  If you are an empiricist like me, you are
> uncomfortable with having no observable behavior to measure.  But in stage
> one sleep there is nothing to observe except by EEG and those kinds of
> things.  The person, however, has experiences that make him believe that he
> is awake and thinking rationally when in fact he is asleep.  I realize that
> I am drifting into stage one when my thoughts become sort of weird.
>
> Stage two is when the REM dreams occur, and again the person has
> experiences without moving anything but his eyelids and a few muscle
> twitches.  Stage 4 is where you have the rare night terrors, waking up
> screaming etc.
>
> Conscious remembrance of these is fraught with peril as far as our
> interpretation of them is concerned.
>
> Are they stages of consciousness?  ​ Is it OK to say that you are
> conscious when you are dreaming?  I tend to relate consciousness to being
> aware of external stimuli, which means that it goes way down the
> phylogenetic scale.  In dreaming there is no awareness of external stimuli
> ordinarily, though the dreamer may hear things and incorporate them in his
> dream.
>
> Many unanswered questions here, especially about definitions.
>

I'd say you're conscious when dreaming or fantasising as you are having
experiences. An inputless computer could also have conscious observers
implemented in a virtual environment.

> --
Stathis Papaioannou
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