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How then do you explain how physical injuries and external stimulation to the brain affect the brain's operation in ways that we increasingly understand? Not sa
by acjohnson55 9y ago
How then do you explain how physical injuries and external stimulation to the brain affect the brain's operation in ways that we increasingly understand? Not saying we're anywhere close to having it all figured out. But this is the sort of question you have to address to accept dualism. I'd certainly like to believe there's something more to my conscious existence than this perishable gray matter.
I prefer to believe instead that I'm a character in an MMORPG. But if that's true, my consciousness still resides within the simulation. At best, the entity controlling me has some superset of my consciousness. At worst, my consciousness is still totally disposable, and my player is just interested in a fun ride.
- andrewflnr 9y agoWell of course you start getting worse reception if the antenna breaks.
- noetic_techy 9y agoHow do you explain being normal and having almost no brain at all: http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-medical-mystery-of-a-man-living-with-90-of-his-brain-missing http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-medical-mystery-of-a-man...
- AgentME 9y agoThis looks like a good example of the 80/20 rule: 80% of our brain matter is dedicated to the hardest last 20% of IQ points. (Only being slightly tongue-in-cheek here.) Also, there's probably usually a lot of brain matter dedicated to redundancy, memories, and enabling connections between ideas to foster creativity, and this person may be lacking in these areas in hard-to-measure ways. If most of our brain truly had no purpose, evolution would have selected against it forever ago. (Instead, evolution went through large lengths to keep our heads so big.)
- noetic_techy 9y agoI agree this could be the other side of the coin. I'm not totally one sided on this. Its possible that consciousness and sentience arises from sheer complexity, I'm just not totally convinced, and there appear to be outliers and unaccounted for anomalies. In this case, 10% = IQ of 80 and totally functional within society. Pretty astonishing still.
- welterde 9y agoThis argument works just as well (or badly) against the brain is just an antenna hypothesis..
- noetic_techy 9y agoI agree. I point this out purely as an outlier that doesn't fit well with the "you are a product of the complexity of your brain matter, period." In this case, only 10% of your brain! Pretty astonishing. The man was totally functional in society, even though he had an IQ in the 80s. A broken antenna still gets most of the signal maybe, just not the high definition stuff.
- King-Aaron 9y ago> At worst, You're just an NPC