Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, I believe you believe in such an "I", as do I and I assume everyone on the planet. But I also (to quote Dennett) say things like "the thermostat wants to keep the temperature between 20 and 22 degrees". It has no wont or desire but it's a handy fiction.

You only point to your head due to modern science; Aristotle thought the brain was for cooling the blood as the ancient Greeks thought the soul was in the liver, hence Prometheus' punishment (although ψυχή was literally "breath" -- cf "atman"). Plenty of cultures thought it in the heart, as do we talk of the heart or gut or generative organs making decisions -- certainly we feel the tough decisions there.

Could it be those with extensive amputations of gut and an articial heart could be "less human" in a broader sense than just mass?

But you seem awfully sure there is consciousness. Perhaps there is no such thing and you only think there is? It seems like a handy mechanism for your genes to use to propagate themselves.

The homunculus model, while popular, isn't particularly insightful and is, recursively, useless.

We have a hell of a lot of evidence that learning, planning, processing sensory input, sending out signals to move muscles etc. are all happening in the brain.

> Could it be those with extensive amputations of gut and an articial heart could be "less human" in a broader sense than just mass?

If that's the case, it's pretty subtle. People with an artificial art don't act much differently than those with a normal heart; compare that with people who've had frontal lobotomies.

> But you seem awfully sure there is consciousness. Perhaps there is no such thing and you only think there is?

This line of argument generally rapidly devolves into semantics and quibbling over definitions. Giving a formal definition of consciousness is difficult. You either end up with a definition like "that phenomena where people think and consider themselves a single entity", in which case it's trivially true that human beings have consciousness; or you define it as something vague and metaphysical like "having a soul" in which case it's unprovable whether humans are conscious or not.

I like this passage from the Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology:

"Consciousness - The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means ... Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it."

No way, dude. There's clinical evidence that such a location in/on the human body represents the true effective residence of human sentience, since snipers target precisely that location to take out their targets, before they have a chance to (even reflexively) react to their wounds.

It doesn’t mean a little person reclines in a hammock there, but I’d wager that there’s a resonant, sensation-event-sensitive waveform, that has a primary focal node looping through a region very close to the pituitary gland in normal, living human beings (with similar analogs in all other mammals, and also many other vertebrates), also hinted at by the pituitary’s role in endocrine governance.

But furthermore, you deny your own agency, if you refute me. I suppose maybe you are simply a bot on the internet, then. In which case, I'm deeply disturbed to find entities on the internet telling me I'm not sentient. Maybe having humans inform me of the same poorly rationalized fallacy is worse?

Your comment echoes my own experience debating the idea of agency / sentience / existence.

No one who makes these types of arguments can justify why they continue to defend their side of the argument if nothing they do matters.

If you truly believe that you do not exist, explain it to me in a way that does not assume your existence. Most of these arguments start with the two words that the most famous argument for existence does, "I think therefore I am".

> There's clinical evidence that such a location in/on the human body represents the true effective residence of human sentience, since snipers target precisely that location to take out their targets, before they have a chance to (even reflexively) react to their wounds.

It tells you no such thing. In a distributed system if you take out the main ethernet switch (interconnect) you can bring the whole system to a halt, but that doesn't mean the computation happens there.

Now, no kidding: there's a massively parallel (80 G neurons x 10^ fanout) machine with a ~ 100 Hz clock inside your skull, but there's a lot of computation going on elsewhere. Look at what I said about all the neurotransmitters in your gut, not to mention the rest of your reticulated nervous system. And people do plenty of things all the time (e.g. hit a baseball) that require a response and feedback faster than the nervous system can transmit from the big bag o' neurons to the wrist.

I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm saying there's far, far from enough evidence in contemporary neuroscience to support the level of confidence you exhibit in your theory of mind.

I dunno. We’ve seen lots of (well maybe a number of famous) cases where an entire hemisphere gets taken out by stroke or trauma, and the sense of self manages to recover.

The brain is extremely sensitive to status across the rest of the body, but based on amputations and circumstances involving life support, viral pathology and hypoxia, there’s strong evidence that time keeping and concept of self sit just above the floor of the brain pan, near the optic nerve’s main cross-over, between the ears. (give or take and inch or two)

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