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Metaesthesia (1/3) [This was meant as a reply to a comment about soul, but I drifted too bad to claim it's really a reply to anything.] The word 'soul' has a lot of baggage I don't care for, but I need some word that expresses the concept of 'feeling', 'perception', 'consciousness' in me. Not my ability to perceive this or that, to feel this or that, but the quality of experiencing stuff at all. Just to get rid of some of the implications of the words above, I could call this feeling of self autoesthesia, or, for an even more pretentious neologism, metaesthesia. I'll conjure a ridiculous, but convenient, word for the act of exercising metaesthesia: metafeeling. Note that in the paragraph above I have talked about myself rather than about humans as a species. This is for several crucial reasons. To confront the thorny one first: quite honestly, I haven't established yet that any of you guys have this. No offense; most of you folks look convincing enough, especially when I only have myself to compare to. In any event, I have to say most of you other people are quite alright phenomenons to perceive. I hope we can still continue this discussion in civilized terms[1]. But I'm trying to be rigorous here (heh..), and for all I know, you could all be replicants, NPCs, or hallucinations. I can only metafeel my own stuff! Another reason why I didn't speak of 'us' is, who are us? What is not us? As soon as I go happily assuming metaesthesia in other stuff, I have no good reason to limit myself to humans, animals, living beings, computational systems, complex systems, material things, or whatever else, if anything, is there. Do my cells metafeel? Do the mitochondria within them? Do cities, societies? Does the world as a whole, does the universe as a whole have a definite consciousness that metafeels itself? [I had to split this. Search in page for "Metaesthesia (2/3)"] |