Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!utnut!utgpu!pindor
From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Is CONSCIOUSNESS continuous? discrete? quantized?
Message-ID: <D6zH7t.L53@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <rudgers.70.0013F197@grove.ufl.edu> <rudgers.79.00006734@grove.ufl.edu> <D6u3JC.I9w@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> <rudgers.92.00004679@grove.ufl.edu>
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 1995 17:14:16 GMT
Lines: 36

In article <rudgers.92.00004679@grove.ufl.edu>,
b a rudgers <rudgers@grove.ufl.edu> wrote:
>In article <D6u3JC.I9w@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor) writes:
>
>>Hardly surprising since a sleeping person is not conscious.
>        *****
>> In case of consciousnes the only accessible(observable) effect of it is 
>>behavior. 
>
>The sense in which we are using "conscious" ought to be in reference to 
>consciousness.  We say that the sleeping person is unconscious and not 
>non-conscious.  The distinction between what is unconscious and what is 
>non-conscious is a rather important one I believe.  Things which are 
>unconscious are only that way temporarily; they are things which have been 
>previously or may be later conscious.  To me it seems that the only 
>sort of thing to which we can ascribe being unconsious (or being 
>conscious for that matter) is something with consciousness.  If something 
>does not have consciousness then it will never be unconscious (the toaster is 
>unconscious?  Shirrly you jest) it will always be non-conscious.  

I find your distinction between "unconscious" and "non-conscious" very
artificial and hard to justify. How about a person who, because of an accident,
becomes a "living vegetable"? How is the fact that he/she was once conscious 
relevent to whether this person is "non-conscious" or "unconscious"?
Is a fact that this person may or may not recover relevent either?
Again the problems seem to be due to a vary vague notion of what consciousness
is. If you do not treat is as a yes/no thing, a lot of these problems are
easier to tackle.

Andrzej

-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
