Re:Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
by UnFleshedOne on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @07:00PM
(#22050515)
No idea about connecting brains, but dividing one actually works and you arguably get 2 independent consciousness with different set of modules available to them (one has language processing that the other one lacks for example).
Look up split brain experiments.
Re:Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
by mirekrusin on Wednesday January 15, 2020 @02:01AM
(#22052241)
That's interesting; points towards "emergent from low level structure".
I wonder if it's possible to quantify concousness and how much of it you loose it. It seems like it's not half/half split, ie. 1+1 != 2; can you split them again and how far you can do it.
I also wonder what would happen if you left them to be for a while and then connect them back, would they merge or stay diverged.
Maybe you could run it on ordinary neural net, it would be easier to quantify. Maybe some numbers would reveal something interesting, ie. maybe neural nets are exponentially better when connected and that's the whole trick. It won't answer questions about counciousness directly though.
It probably helps to think about some edge cases to get some insight.
What happens when you sleep and you loose sense of conciousness?
What happens in cases of brain injury where concousiness goes into weird failure modes - thinking it wakes up on the same state every day, thinking it's -1month or so, collapsing etc.
What happens in cases of distorted/malfunctioning brain schizophrenia etc.
I've read somewhere that if you put implant which mimics neuron activity, your brain will build structure around it just like with normal neurons. What would happen if you take 1 square mm of brain and replace it with implant, slowly replacing the whole brain? What happens when you attach brain to larger structure/orders of magnitude more complex one, will conciousness transfer there? Can you disconnect original brain leaving conciousness?
As we don't have powerfull computers yet to compete with brain, is it possible to connect two brains instead?
Memory is likely playing central role. You are what you remember it seems. Can you boost memory capacity with some implants, will it make more-conciousness?
There are many not yet feasible experiments, but some should be. Also completely brutal in many cases.