On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 11:21 PM, archytas <nwterry@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?
--
EverComing
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