| Metaesthesia (2/3) [This follows from anoter post in this page. Search for Metaesthesia (1/3) if interested.] In the interest of agility, I'll go one level deeper into insanity and present the rest of my drivel as an interview with myself: How can things metafeel if they don't have nervous systems, or any mechanism for reacting to their environments? Well, they can have very peaceful feelings. I know where you're coming from: I can relate my feelings to the flow of information through my nervous system. I can see how different conditions that alter the quality of that flow alter the quality of my feelings similarly. Extrapolating, I'd say that feeling emerges somehow from complex order. Ha! Typical nervous system chauvinism. (sigh) What's a neural network to do? No, really. Why are my metafeelings bound to my physical body? If everything metafeels, why don't I metafeel everything? Why this fragmentation? I imagine there is some I that emerges from the interactions of my body with other entities. My matter, my actions serve that consciousness too, although I am a less significant part of it. Just as most of my cells are replaced often (and thus, I presume, their tiny consciousnesses are born and die), while my perceived self stays mostly constant. So what if half my brain was transplanted to other body? I hope you'll go on the other half. No, seriously: after some initial weirdness and confusion, it will be business as usual. The other body will be a different person. A very affine person, to be sure. Maybe like someone you've spent all your life with and told all your secrets to, probably someone you'll care a lot about. But I bet you can get something similar without surgery, if you were willing to go all the way to get that level of intimacy with someone. It's scary and it wouldn't be easy to know yourself well enough, nor it would be easy for the other person to understand you well enough, but I bet some approximation is possible by good old interpersonal communication means. So what about the converse? Could it be possible to merge consciousnesses by merging nervous systems? I bet. That would be an even more interesting experiment. For maybe different degrees of metaesthetical merging, you could link brains temporarily or permanently, and you could do it with more or less bandwidth. [Continued in Metaesthesia (3/3), which search for.] |