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Article 2976 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Anesthesia
Message-ID: <63095@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 21 Jan 92 23:42:28 GMT
References: <62373@netnews.upenn.edu> <13010@pitt.UUCP> <62555@netnews.upenn.edu> <13086@pitt.UUCP>
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Reply-To: weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Organization: The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology
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In-reply-to: geb@dsl.pitt.edu (gordon e. banks)

In article <13086@pitt.UUCP>, geb@dsl (gordon e. banks) writes:
>>The curious way in which consciousness alone seems to be negated.  Sensory
>>input and learning and emotional reaction can still go on under anesthesia.
>>A purely neural network theory of all mental features will have to show
>>some extra ingenuity to explain this.

>Well, that depends on the type of anesthesia.  In most cases, there is
>no memory (and thus no learning) and patients recall nothing, making
>it hard to test just what might or might not have been present.

Tests have done where anesthetized patients are presented with information
during an operation--afterwards, they have a stronger response to what they
were presented with while out.

>Another point: various systems of the brain such as the thalamus,
>which feels the pain, and the reticular activating system, which
>maintains consciousness, may not have the same sorts of neurons
>or neurotransmitters.  Various agents may act differentially on
>them, producing loss of consciousness without loss of pain reaction,
>or the converse.

Be that as it may, it's still not known what goes on with anesthesia.  A
very recent SCIENCE or NATURE had a news article on the growing evidence
for the specific protein hypothesis, as opposed to the more popular lipid
hypothesis.  The former, if verified, would probably kill my belief that
anesthesia is a puzzle regarding consciousness.

>>>Again, what exactly do you mean by conscious?

>>Nothing "exact" in particular.  It's a flexible concept that none of us
>>understand yet.  How else could I say "so give the dogfish ..."?

>Well, before we say what types of animals are conscious and what
>aren't, we'd better have a better idea of what we mean by conscious,
>I'd say.  Too much fuzziness and flexibility makes it hard to say
>anything sensible about it.

I prefer to think of this as normal pre-understood science.  The word
"heat" was (and is) used in all sorts of fuzzy manners, but this did
not prevent thermodynamics from getting off the ground.  At some point,
a definitive meaning was adopted, and vague use left for the vernacular.
-- 
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu)


