hutch (02/25/83)
Thanks to all of you out there who let me know that I do exist. Or at least that I think I sometimes like to imagine that I am reading mail that might have been sent by something that could be another person, out in the far reaches of networkland, and it is sometimes interesting to imagine that this means I exist . . . Anyway: This is the middle of an ongoing essay. If you missed the first two parts, send me a note and I will try to mail you a copy. Physical senses might provide some analogy to the "senses of self" that I want to identify. Physical senses are mediated by the nervous system, in humans and the more complex animals. Since I cannot make meaningful dialogue with a plant, I cannot ask it what physical senses it might have. They don't seem to be mediated by nerves, but instead by local growth-hormone and mechanically triggered systems, anyway. There is no direct equivalent to a nervous system for the postulated awareness of a human. Some people will say that there are energy nodes, also called chakras, but that all falls under the heading of mysticism and can not be proven from the philosophical argument I am trying to develop. In order to identify this awareness, and to determine if it is mediated physically, or if it is abstracted from the physical, we need to decide what it includes at the very least. I had attempted to show that some awareness is required to explain certain aspects of the activities of living things. What this basically means to me is that there is some decision system which is at least psuedorandom at the most basic level and which determines the actions that an organism takes. Some are mechanical, but some which seem to have no direct origin in the environment of the organism, I have defined as the probable result of an awareness of motivation. (This is one of the weak points of this essay. Please feel free to disillusion me, if you are able to point out any major flaws in the formation of this idea.) Since we have isolated the awareness of motivation, we can classify the motivations. These are usually rather simple in the less complex creatures. They seem to become more complex in more complex creatures. The awareness of beauty is clearly more complex than the drive to survival, although it may incorporate some of the simpler motivations. Hmm. I may have come upon something here. Awarenesses are used to determine whether or not a motivation is being satisfied. I know this is sounding rather too Freudian, but please bear with me while I look for terminology. It looks like awarenesses and motivations are tied rather closely to the physical processes of the organism. The process of determining which of the motivations to satisfy, when that number is limited, is based on the value that satisfying the motivation has to the organism. The choices seem to be based on a function which weighs these values and applies the pseudorandom principle to force decisions. When we get a creature as complex as a human then many motivations and awarenesses, while they depend on the physical senses, are still rather far removed from the primary motivations that engender them. So far there is nothing that REQUIRES the presence of a soul or spirit. Neither is there anything which prevents such a presence. It would tend to facilitate certain parts of the decision process. However, if you want to identify the system of processes which is used to make the decision as being the spirit. . . I will make an analogy here which you can shoot full of holes if you want to. There are several operating systems out there. (OH NO NOT THAT ANALOGY) These systems give life to the computers they run on. We cannot and know better than to say that it is any part of the hardware of the machine. However, it is there. The behaviour of the machine changes very remarkably if we change its operating system. I assert that there are strong similarities between the spirit of a living thing and the operating system of a machine. These ideas lead to some very disturbing conclusions, and I am going to stop writing so I can consider some of them. I now return to my gopher hole, now awaiting the descent of many great mallets from the sky that will squash all this pretentious discussion. Steve Hutchison ... decvax!tektronix!tekmdp!dadla!hutch