Expansion of Description of bookmark id: c11458ce6a11
Some of the things people said that really piqued my interest:
This is from a nested thread inside the nested thread link that is this bookmark. Link to this specific nested thread is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9834686:
Person A: "Yeah, I've had that also. Very strange, like how does one recognize that one has "woken up" from being already awake? It's like, oh, the tape recorder turned back on. Maybe we're just the tape recorder?"
Person B: "Yes, it's a popular view nowadays among psychologists and cognitive scientists that the conscious self is just a sort of a senior manager that receives reports and thinks he's in charge while in fact his subordinates work just fine even when he's temporarily not available at all."
Person A: "Well, it's an interesting point, because apparently if the tape recorder never turns back on, you're just kinda stuck in time as the person you were. So it suggests at the least that the tape recorder aspect of consciousness, perhaps in the way it feeds back one's perception of oneself to oneself, is crucial in the sort of consciousness we humans see as critical to identity. Clearly though, this guy is still "conscious" - it seems like a situation we don't have quite the correct terminology to describe."
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Now the topic is still the same in nested thread, but because a diff user posts this link, it also goes into "Philosophical zombie" which I still need to read up on.
Person C: "Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie"
Person B: "It's sort of a weak version of a P-zombie. Presumably the lack of conscious awareness would still be observable using a sufficiently detailed brain scan if not anything else, as opposed to a "real" P-zombie where the presence of consciousness is assumed to be completely epiphenomenal."
Person A: "It's not that we're not aware, it's essentially that we may only be aware - aware of our thoughts once our subconscious thinks them, aware of our actions and their consequences once they're made. The trick, seemingly is manipulating the focus of awareness to convince the subconscious decision-making apparatus to make different decisions, even though all we really have control of is our awareness."
Person B: "Yes, this is the "weak" position. The original definition of a P-zombie is an entity that really does have no qualia, that is, subjective experience or "consciousness", but behaves exactly like it did, down to the neuronal level. It is a thought experiment and can be used as a reductio ad absurdum to argue that eg. uploads still have qualia."
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Actual topic link is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9833717 titled 'After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories'.
Link goes to http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150630-my-dentist-saved-my-tooth-but-stole-my-memory.
Overall, interesting. Not just article of course, but all of this "twilight" sort of stuff. Heh.