OK, just tell me you're not running Windows XP. I couldn't handle it.
You call it "the ghost in the machine?" Wasn't that Julian Huxley's insight
Gilbert Ryle. It's of course merely a sardonic reference to Cartesian dualism. Is there anything intrinsic about it? It asks the question, must we think of ourselves as mind within a cage of matter, or is it just the way we were taught to think?
That is ridiculous B.S. on its face, RWP: The proposed exercise or experiment reveals everything about the way we think, if the person conducting it is really paying attention.
Since clearly a computer is capable of thinking about itself thinking about itself thinking, in what way does this recursion prove you are different from a computer? And computers mostly pay attention, unless some unthinking boor has run a huge processor-hogging job in the background.
I think 'experience' has everything to do with the way we've learned to interact with the world. These days, people are inclined to look at experience as a sort of movie, viewed by the homunculus inside their heads. I suspect that before TV took up so much of people's lives, people's experience was more verbal; reading Shakespeare, it's difficult to escape the conclusion that he (and his contemporaries) considered experience to be a stream of words, rather than a movie. Before that, experience was a stream of often frightening events, made sense of only in terms of the acts of capricious gods.
Detachment is often a respose to stress. I often wonder if Cartesian dualism isn't a response to the scary realization that we are usually at the mercy of external forces we can't control. So, you can crush my skull, but you can't crush me.
I'll make a confession to you BB. When I haven't eaten breakfast, about 11 a.m. I get really nasty. The glucose levels drop, and it changes me.
Wonderful post that.
I like to think of the mind as a multitude of signals riding on a carrier wave, the action of the neurons. Neurons fire in isolation at a nearly steady rate. In the brain their firing rate and timing is affected by the signals of connected neurons. The connections are electrochemical rather than electronic. There is an incredible amount of slop in the determination of when and whether to fire. I personally don't think it will ever be possible to record or reproduce the personality of a living person. Just my opinion, but I think the sloppiness of the brain is similar to the sloppiness of evolution. It looks bizarre to a computer engineer, but it probably makes the system better than it would be if the tolerances were tight.