[Mind's Eye] Re: My fellow zombies

Seems everybody else is competent, knowledgeable and certain about
matters only " X " may be privy to !

Today morning, I toyed with the thought... then asked for a cup of
coffee instead of the usual tea. It's a matter of fact... I do not
remember having coffee as my first cup of the day.

Then, too, I toyed with the thought... and decided to take my car for
pollution check today itself, when I could easily have performed the
task on any one the next 5 days.

Now, all my contemporaries can show me the research papers, the
library full... and can pronounce with all manner of reasoning and
rhetoric, their own beliefs and opinions, but the fact that is clear
to me, as was then when it happened and now as I recall... is that I
did act out of my own free will.

I believe it's everyone's job and responsibility to come to their own
understanding and conclusion in such matters, and actually fob off all
manner of opinions that ' scientists ' and ' researchers ' are
throwing out ... dicting and contradicting, everyday.

I suspect matters are much simpler and immediately accessible to each
one of us.

On Aug 2, 10:51 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "We have access to a technology that would have looked like sorcery in
> Descartes's day: the ability to peer inside someone's head and read
> their thoughts. Unfortunately, that doesn't take us any nearer to
> knowing whether they are sentient. "Even if you measure brainwaves,
> you can never know exactly what experience they represent," says
> psychologist Bruce Hood at the University of Bristol, UK.  If
> anything, brain scanning has undermined Descartes's maxim. You, too,
> might be a zombie. "I happen to be one myself," says Stanford
> University philosopher Paul Skokowski. "And so, even if you don't
> realise it, are you." Skokowski's assertion is based on the belief,
> particularly common among neuroscientists who study brain scans, that
> we do not have free will. There is no ghost in the machine; our
> actions are driven by brain states that lie entirely beyond our
> control. "I think, therefore I am" might be an illusion.
> So, it may well be that you live in a computer simulation in which you
> are the only self-aware creature. I could well be a zombie and so
> could you. Have an interesting day." (from a recent New Scientist)
>
> We range over debates in free will and what it is to be human. So far
> we haven't established free will or even that we are not merely
> avatars in 'something else's game'.
>
> I wonder whether there are advantages in considering ourselves as
> creatures limited by programming and also capable of it?