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Quote by Hrishikesh Agnihotri

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Enrich The World With Your Presence : HA's Original Quotes, Volume 01

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Hrishikesh Agnihotri

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“Positive arguments for the natural possibility of absent qualia have not been as prevalent as arguments for inverted qualia, but they have been made. The most detailed presentation of these arguments is given by Block (1978). These arguments almost always have the same form. They consist in the exhibition of a realization of our functional organization in some unusual medium, combined with an appeal to intuition. It is pointed out, for example, that the organization of our brain might be simulated by the people of China or even mirrored in the economy of Bolivia. If we got every person in China to simulate a neuron (we would need to multiply the population by ten or one hundred, but no matter), and equipped them with radio links to simulate synaptic connections, then the functional organization would be there. But surely, says the argument, this baroque system would not be conscious! There is a certain intuitive force to this argument. Many people have a strong feeling that a system like this is simply the wrong sort of thing to have a conscious experience. Such a “group mind” would seem to be the stuff of a science-fiction tale, rather than the kind of thing that could really exist. But there is only an intuitive force. This certainly falls far short of a knockdown argument. Many have pointed out that while it may be intuitively implausible that such a system should give rise to experience, it is equally intuitively implausible that a brain should give rise to experience! Whoever would have thought that this hunk of gray matter would be the sort of thing that could produce vivid subjective experiences? And yet it does. Of course this does not show that a nation's population could produce a mind, but it is a strong counter to the intuitive argument that it would not. . . . Once we realize how tightly a specification of functional organization constrains the structure of a system, it becomes less implausible that even the population of China could support conscious experience if organized appropriately. If we take our image of the population, speed it up by a factor of a million or so, and shrink it into an area the size of a head, we are left with something that looks a lot like a brain, except that it has homunculi—tiny people—where a brain would have neurons. On the face of it, there is not much reason to suppose that neurons should do any better a job than homunculi in supporting experience.”

MindBrainConsciousnessMetaphysicsPhilosophy Of MindMind Body Problem
Book:The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory
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“Suppose you have 2L of nectar and you want a vessel to keep it. There is a golden vessel of 1L capacity and there is a steel vessel of 2L capacity. If your mind were free, you would choose the steel vessel and be happy. But your mind is conditioned to believe that gold is better than steel. So none of the vessels will make you happy. Steel one will make you feel inferior and gold one can't contain all of your nectar.”

MindSpiritualityFreedomSocietyConditioning
Author:Shunya
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