[Mind's Eye] Re: My fellow zombies

Two of my sons want us to start a coffee plantation. I keep thinking
of Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen- "Out of Africa".

On Aug 2, 7:06 pm, Vam <atewari2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -