Processes
Re-reading yesterday's section, I think you do well up to the point where you ask what is mind. I don't really think that mind is brain viewed from the inside. Little pieces of your brain can get replaced over time, but we would not say that little pieces of your mind ever get replaced. You touch on this subject in your penultimate paragraph. I therefore think that mind supervenes over the brain. No computer backup is something over which the same token of the mind could supervene.
What if you slowly split the consciousness in two over the two different mediums? Half your consciousness could supervene over brain processes. Half could supervene over computer processes. We can assume that phenomenologically, you could not tell the difference between this condition of consciousness and the way it normally is. We could imagine this process continuing until your consciousness was fully supervening over the computer. I think that that would be a legitimate transference.
The way you describe that, it sounds like it would be. But let's imagine an illegitimate transference as well, where you take a backup of someone's consciousness. We can assume that the second you take this backup, the first thing that you do is kill the original consciousness off. We can also assume that the backup starts up in the very same instant on a computer. The transference of the consciousness over time is therefore smooth as glass. But the transference over space is abrupt. What we are talking about here is therefore what makes a token the same token over time when that token supervenes over other things.
Can we conclude that space and time are both necessary mediums of transference?
I don't think that you can say that time is a necessary medium of transference. If that were the case, then what can you say about someone who is knocked out? For a while, their consciousness does not transfer over time. But when it finally starts up again, it does indeed seem to be the same token of consciousness.
But what about the same transference across space? What if after the person has been knocked out, you move him to the hospital? When he comes to in the hospital, can we say that his consciousness has been 'transferred' across space?
The medium of transference is still the same, namely the brain.
I think I'm beginning to see what we need from a medium of transference. It has to be replaceable in gradual steps. But not too much can be replaced at a time, or else the transference is broken.
I think that there is a further source of confusion here. Consciousness must supervene over things like neural cells, but not molecules or atoms. Presumably these are the things over which cells themselves supervene, and so they will have their own rules of transference. Cells in the brain cannot be replaced due to the complex network of interconnections between them. But presumably the molecules in them may be, and certainly the atoms would.
But if cells in the brain are not replaced, then mind doesn't really need to supervene over brain.
The dominant paradigm is that we are born with all the neural cells that we will ever have. But "Recent experiments on monkeys" suggest otherwise. According to Stephanie Wall, they "have shown that new neurons are continually added to the cerebral cortex throughout adulthood." You'd need two different accounts of mind to work things out thorougly. One could be where mind is brain viewed phenomenologically. One is where mind is supervenient and you work out notions of supervenient transfer.
Perhaps it would help if you drew an analogy with a computer program. It seems hard to believe that mind is like a program that is not active. But in order to be active, the program must be executed. Once executed, the program runs in a specific space allocated to it by the operating system.
It seems hard to deny that consciousness is a process. But two different processes can be spawned from the same program.
That's just it. I remember that a friend of mine from university who studied computer science said that the mind was a program, but I no longer believe this. He didn't make a distinction between the program, and the process from which it is spawned; he should have. For a program is nothing but raw data, but its process is a unique and irreplaceable activity. It is dependent not just on the software from which it originated, but also on the hardware. In liberal programming languages like C, certain processes can be unpredictable, irreducible to the original software. Presumably they are still deterministic. But the point is that there is no manual anywhere that can determine what they will do. It is purely a result of the unique set of characteristics that will combine software and hardware, material and performance.
This would seem to explain sleep. Not sleep in which one dreams, but the certain percentage of sleep we undergo where there is no appreciable consciousness.
There is always an appreciable consciousness. Some part of our mind is always active, listening to the environment for change or danger. That is why we can be woken up by people shaking us, or calling our name.
Fascinating--but what makes that just one unbroken process? Consider the Linux bootstrapping process. When the computer is off, of course, no processes exist at all, but there is no one process that can be called the Linux session. Lower-level processes call higher-level processes until we finally end up in GNOME, ready to type on our word processor. Surely our mind works in a similar way. Are we prepared to call the autonomic system part of the mind, for example, or is that too low-level, and where do you draw the line?
Oh dear, questions to be addressed in the next section...
What if you slowly split the consciousness in two over the two different mediums? Half your consciousness could supervene over brain processes. Half could supervene over computer processes. We can assume that phenomenologically, you could not tell the difference between this condition of consciousness and the way it normally is. We could imagine this process continuing until your consciousness was fully supervening over the computer. I think that that would be a legitimate transference.
The way you describe that, it sounds like it would be. But let's imagine an illegitimate transference as well, where you take a backup of someone's consciousness. We can assume that the second you take this backup, the first thing that you do is kill the original consciousness off. We can also assume that the backup starts up in the very same instant on a computer. The transference of the consciousness over time is therefore smooth as glass. But the transference over space is abrupt. What we are talking about here is therefore what makes a token the same token over time when that token supervenes over other things.
Can we conclude that space and time are both necessary mediums of transference?
I don't think that you can say that time is a necessary medium of transference. If that were the case, then what can you say about someone who is knocked out? For a while, their consciousness does not transfer over time. But when it finally starts up again, it does indeed seem to be the same token of consciousness.
But what about the same transference across space? What if after the person has been knocked out, you move him to the hospital? When he comes to in the hospital, can we say that his consciousness has been 'transferred' across space?
The medium of transference is still the same, namely the brain.
I think I'm beginning to see what we need from a medium of transference. It has to be replaceable in gradual steps. But not too much can be replaced at a time, or else the transference is broken.
I think that there is a further source of confusion here. Consciousness must supervene over things like neural cells, but not molecules or atoms. Presumably these are the things over which cells themselves supervene, and so they will have their own rules of transference. Cells in the brain cannot be replaced due to the complex network of interconnections between them. But presumably the molecules in them may be, and certainly the atoms would.
But if cells in the brain are not replaced, then mind doesn't really need to supervene over brain.
The dominant paradigm is that we are born with all the neural cells that we will ever have. But "Recent experiments on monkeys" suggest otherwise. According to Stephanie Wall, they "have shown that new neurons are continually added to the cerebral cortex throughout adulthood." You'd need two different accounts of mind to work things out thorougly. One could be where mind is brain viewed phenomenologically. One is where mind is supervenient and you work out notions of supervenient transfer.
Perhaps it would help if you drew an analogy with a computer program. It seems hard to believe that mind is like a program that is not active. But in order to be active, the program must be executed. Once executed, the program runs in a specific space allocated to it by the operating system.
It seems hard to deny that consciousness is a process. But two different processes can be spawned from the same program.
That's just it. I remember that a friend of mine from university who studied computer science said that the mind was a program, but I no longer believe this. He didn't make a distinction between the program, and the process from which it is spawned; he should have. For a program is nothing but raw data, but its process is a unique and irreplaceable activity. It is dependent not just on the software from which it originated, but also on the hardware. In liberal programming languages like C, certain processes can be unpredictable, irreducible to the original software. Presumably they are still deterministic. But the point is that there is no manual anywhere that can determine what they will do. It is purely a result of the unique set of characteristics that will combine software and hardware, material and performance.
This would seem to explain sleep. Not sleep in which one dreams, but the certain percentage of sleep we undergo where there is no appreciable consciousness.
There is always an appreciable consciousness. Some part of our mind is always active, listening to the environment for change or danger. That is why we can be woken up by people shaking us, or calling our name.
Fascinating--but what makes that just one unbroken process? Consider the Linux bootstrapping process. When the computer is off, of course, no processes exist at all, but there is no one process that can be called the Linux session. Lower-level processes call higher-level processes until we finally end up in GNOME, ready to type on our word processor. Surely our mind works in a similar way. Are we prepared to call the autonomic system part of the mind, for example, or is that too low-level, and where do you draw the line?
Oh dear, questions to be addressed in the next section...
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