Thread: Two conciouses at once

Evidence?

Evidence against?

edit:
Right, to give a bit more detail, if two people are concious at the same time, it is seperate existances, basically if you are concious then other people can't be at the same time as or they are not concious. it's very hard to explain, but do you see where i am basically coming from?

No, not at all. That's like saying a loaf of bread can't exist if another loaf of bread already exists. It doesn't make any sense.

Originally Posted by Thatperson

Evidence against?

edit:
Right, to give a bit more detail, if two people are concious at the same time, it is seperate existances, basically if you are concious then other people can't be at the same time as or they are not concious. it's very hard to explain, but do you see where i am basically coming from?

Yeah...I don't really see what you're saying, either. How is it that you figure two people cannot experience consciousness at the same time?

LOLwut Philosophy Thread #94865094

even if you believe we are all one consciousness, does not mean only one point of conscious is conscious at a time

you are a 'point' of consciousness, a consciousness existing where it is existing. this point can be a tiny point of a greater consciousness

do you see then how it is possible for all consciousness to be connected, to be one, but individualized as points? like points on a map. its still just one map.

Well from a subjective standpoint, which is the only way anyone ever experiences the world, we only experience our own consciousness directly. You might be lead to conclude that there is only one consciousness-your own. It might help to concieve of consciousness as a series of 'points'. Each point is a moment of conscious experience and your single consciousness travels along those points independently of 'external world time'. At a single point of external time there could be billions of different 'points' of consciousness. An interesting consequence of thinking about consciousness in this way is that, if you believe there is only one consciousness, you are connected to other peoples' consciousness just as much as you are connected to your own past and future.

Like a ghost flitting through a world of machines, experiencing one robot's memories and feelings without memory of its previous lives? (either minute-b-minute or one life at a time, does it matter?)

That's the idea I'm getting from Thatperson. It's interesting, even if it doesn;t make much sense aside from a purely sensual point of view, since you can;t in fact feel consciousness aside from your own (unless you're an amazingly gifted telepath, in which case, how can you tell it's consciousness, and not yours, that you feel?)

Makes no sense at all to me. If you can have one then you can have many.

There are many paradoxes of consciousness but this is not one of them.

Good point Jet, even if you could experience other consciousnesses you could only experience that consciousness as being your own.

Xei, how would any distinction between one consciousness and another have any meaning? It's not like a consciousness is some physical object that you can observe. Discussion of consciousness as such an object would just be a meaningless theoritical abstraction and would have no relation to life as we live it. In otherwords, if a consciousness moves from any one moment to another, there is no reason to believe it can't or won't move from that one moment to any other. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that consciousness moves from one moment to another in a linear fashion. In fact any discussion of consciousness moving in a time-ordered fashion is also a meaningless abstraction as the consciousness functions outside of any objective timeline. At the same time you can't really break conscious experience into quantized 'moments' either, so you are left with conscious experience as one unified whole or not at all.

Time is relative. Two consciousness can be active at the same time. However, they in must be experienced in a seperated order.

I don't think consciousness can be experienced. Consciousness is experience.

Xei, how would any distinction between one consciousness and another have any meaning? It's not like a consciousness is some physical object that you can observe. Discussion of consciousness as such an object would just be a meaningless theoritical abstraction and would have no relation to life as we live it. In otherwords, if a consciousness moves from any one moment to another, there is no reason to believe it can't or won't move from that one moment to any other. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that consciousness moves from one moment to another in a linear fashion. In fact any discussion of consciousness moving in a time-ordered fashion is also a meaningless abstraction as the consciousness functions outside of any objective timeline. At the same time you can't really break conscious experience into quantized 'moments' either, so you are left with conscious experience as one unified whole or not at all.

I don't understand your point... I personally think that consciousness is the result of an interaction between maths and physical reality; basically an active neural network. Such things are clearly discrete. The causality of our neural networks remains well within the confines of our brains and is very distinct from any other neutal network, so I don't see why anybody thinks any 'merging' could occur.

Every one of us in this thread is "I"

We speak as such

We think as such

We visualize as such


It is not "I" that is unique

What surrounds each "I" is what is unique

A collection of thoughts

Ideas forming a individual existant perception

A "unique" fingerprint


Connection does not rest within the conceptual mind

Awareness bridges the gap from one to another

Transcends the conscious mind

So thatperson, do you mean that two consciousnesses couldn't be merged, two consciousnesses can't exist at the same time, or what?

I'm pretty sure that what he's referring to is the theory that there is opne consciousness, and it's reincarnated into different people all the time. Eventually, most or all people will have been conscious for most or all of the time, even though there has only been one consciousness, with amnesia every time it switches bodies.

Originally Posted by JET73L

I'm pretty sure that what he's referring to is the theory that there is opne consciousness, and it's reincarnated into different people all the time. Eventually, most or all people will have been conscious for most or all of the time, even though there has only been one consciousness, with amnesia every time it switches bodies.

Exactly what i mean

and also regarding what bcomp said, yeah two consciousnesses can't exist at the same time in my theory.

You're assuming "consciousness" is a thing, and a non-physical thing, at that.

That's two assumptions too many. If you're going to assume anything, it makes much more sense to assume that consciousness is a process carried out by physical means in conscious beings. In that light, there's no reason not to have as many conscious beings as you want at any point in time.

Is it physical though?

It doesn't matter what it's physically made of (according to functionalism which I believe to be unfalsifiable), so it appears to me that platonic reality is the realm of consciousness.

Read The Emperor's New Mind.

Originally Posted by Xei

It doesn't matter what it's physically made of (according to functionalism which I believe to be unfalsifiable), so it appears to me that platonic reality is the realm of consciousness.

I HATE Plato. Seriously, maybe I'm just really stupid, but it seems to me that most of his ideas were completely inane and unfounded, especially his idea world nonsense.

You can make a computer out of spaghetti or legos, and make both run the same program. Does this program then need to exist as a non-physical thing in some magical other world?

It's not really magic. When it comes down to it, physical reality is no more than maths. What we consider to be physical is a delusion; solid objects, etcetera. It's all just maths in the end. Fractals also suggest a platonic reality to me.

Anyway, yeah, you're basically supporting the operationalist view... what about the book which emulates Einstein's brain, which contians a set of instructions which you follow to get an answer to any question you want to ask it? That's basically a program. You think that if people used the book at the same time they would simultaneously be creating little bits of Einstein consciousness?

I saw a documentary once where some woman had an operation where her brain was, to some degree, cut down the middle to stop her from having seizures.

There was this weird side effect where she had two "conscious" minds working at once. For example, she'd be getting dressed in the morning and would try to put two different pairs of pants on - because her mind wanted two things at once. Two individual conscious minds were controlling the one body.

You can probably google it or something and find what I'm talking about, I'm about to go to sleep, but hopefully this wasn't completely irrelevant to the thread.

Originally Posted by Delilah

I saw a documentary once where some woman had an operation where her brain was, to some degree, cut down the middle to stop her from having seizures.

There was this weird side effect where she had two "conscious" minds working at once. For example, she'd be getting dressed in the morning and would try to put two different pairs of pants on - because her mind wanted two things at once. Two individual conscious minds were controlling the one body.

You can probably google it or something and find what I'm talking about, I'm about to go to sleep, but hopefully this wasn't completely irrelevant to the thread.

I'm pretty sure you're refering to one of the rare cases where someone has something called "alien hand."

I don't feel like going into it but here wiki has done the job for me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome

I'm not really sure what the consensus is at the moment but doubt that there are two seperate people in one. Although there was the story about the HS kid who had left over parts from the speaking sectors of the brain after such a scenario in which his hand could write things independently of him...interestingly enough they asked him what he wanted to be when he "grew up" and he replied vocally that he wanted to be something like a draftsman and was already preparing for it, meanwhile when his hand responded it said "race car driver" which was weird to him since he never even considered that option.

Thanks for the article, Sandform. That's exactly what I was talking about, but after reading the article I don't think it's a case of having two conscious minds in one either... which is sort of dissappointing.