thread: 2007-02-26 : Exorcism followthrough
On 2007-02-28, NinJ wrote:
Consciousness is a process, not a thing. Your mind is like a wave: it's a state that matter is in over time. As it moves, it changes because what it moves over (including itself) changes it (and, interestingly, vice-versa). The idea that a soul is a wave is fine by me; it's splitting hairs to say "soul" or "mind" or "counsciousness". But to say that a soul is a thing that somehow exists outside of that process, frozen, I think is something that is either impossible or irrelevant. If you can stop a consciousness, restarting it later from where it left off, the consciousness is either aware of what's changed (that is, it's moving forward anyway) or it's unaware (that is, its state was preserved, including all of its vectors).
In neither of these cases do we need to posit that there's some "thing" that motivates the stuff I'm made of; the stuff is built in such a way that processes cascade through each other, which emerge as a self.
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What's the problem of pain? I find it pretty useful, myself.
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For being "the safest way to travel," the teleporter sure is pretty unsafe. Maybe walking has gotten a lot more dangerous in the 23rd century.
