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From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Free Will
Message-ID: <1996Jan24.182248.3716@media.mit.edu>
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Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996 18:22:48 GMT
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In article <4e4gu7$r4q@aurora.cs.athabascau.ca> burt@cs.athabascau.ca (Burt Voorhees) writes:
>
>Minsky says that in his schematic free will is a very small box because
>we keep taking things out of it, and never puting things back in.
>Sounds like the cornucopia.  If one looks inside that box one will
>find, not nothing, but emptiness; the state that the Buddhists attempt
>to reach with their "nety-nety" exercise (very similar to the Socratic
>negative dialectic) which strips away all false identifications, leaving
>only that which is real--undifferentiated consciousness.  It is all very
>well to claim that that "emerges" from matter, but nobody I know of has
>ever provided a successful explanation.  Most people seem satisfied to
>load the entire burden on the weak shoulders of that word "emerges",
>a real cop out.
>
>bv

I don't believe that you can be conscious of being conscious without
being conscious of being conscious of something.  What could be good
evidence for the existence of "undifferentiated consciousness".  Is it
like a colorless color or a massless mass?

In short, I can't decide whether that distinction between nothingness and
emptiness is vacuous or meaningless.


