hedonologist

This seems to be your reasoning. If we choose it, we must have desired it, if we desired it, it must have been pleasurable. That would seem to be "rational" given that the person perfers pleasure, like I would think that I do, but I just don't see any proof of this.

[ January 13, 2002: Message edited by: hedonologist ]</p>

excreationist

Yes, when you have to choose between the lesser of two evils. e.g. your options might be being whipped 50 times or 200 times (or 300, if you try and run away). You end up "seeking" pain - the minimum possible pain.

The choice we made gave us the outcome we really wanted, and the reason we wanted it is because we intuitively determined that this possible outcome is associated with the maximum amount of pleasure or minimum amount of pain when compared to the known alternatives. This evaluation can be very flawed though - disproportionately emphasizing some parts of the alternatives so that a bad decision is made.

Almost, but not quite. If we desire something then we expect it to have a good chance of bringing us pleasure. (A cost-benefits type analysis) I guess you could also say that desire also minimizes potential pain. (e.g. we desire to not run on freeways due to the great likelihood of us being hurt) Maybe I will use desire to talk about desires to talk about things we want to avoid... I'm not sure... Or what about this - we seek the greatest pleasures and avoid the greatest pains. (That gets rid of the confusing "desire" word)

It has to do with the emotions being weighed up. As an approximation, say a very pleasurable emotion could be +80 and mild discomfort might be -5.
Now say you like icecream and you see some on the freeway. Eating icecream might give you pleasure of +60 with a chance of 0.5 (sometimes you get bored of it). The perceived chance of being hurt on a freeway might be 0.5 and the expected pain if you're hurt might be -200. The embarrasment you feel from eating off of the road from you and onlookers could be -80 with a chance of 0.9.
The alternative is just to try to ignore the ice-cream and that might bring you a pain of -10.

So the first option is:
+60 * 0.5 -200 * 0.5 -80 * 0.9 = -142.
The second option is:
-10.

The first option contained the greatest expected pleasure (from eating the icecream, 50% of the time) but overall it is much less desirable.
(-142 &lt; -10)

Adrian Selby

"1) Say we had the technology to do total brain transplants and the resulting person would seem to function fine. You are considering whether to have this operation on your health insurance policy, in the event that your brain stops functioning and can’t be repaired. If you did then you would have someone else’s brain transplanted into your (former) head. Would you want to have this?"

Sorry to jump in, but as a materialist I wanted to comment on this question.

I'd say I would not want to have this, but because this brain, being a brain, has the emergent property of consciousness. This brain has distinguished itself from its environment over many years and has learned vocabularies that allow it to communicate, adn refine its self concept. Part of these vocabularies invoke the concept of I. Thus, this emergent consciousness, being implicitly self conscious, being 'me' as it likes to call itself, could not, with the introduction of another brain in its (my) place continue existing as 'me'. Me, is just a brain that's being. A brain like this, and like many of yours I'd guess (I'm aware that this is part of the problem) is, by being what it is, conscious, and has the properties of self consciousness.

So, it would not want this other brain to be attached to the spinal column its currently attached to, and which, at some level affects its consciousness and its 'self', because there is no me beyond this brain that is self conscious, or conscious that in the nature of that consciousness has a very particular perspective on the world that, along with physically consistent appearance, could be defined by others to be me.

A poster in the thread earlier mentioned that we knew too little about consciousness. I fully concur with that, and for me is the main part of the problem with this zombie debate. To say, 'imagine a zombie behaves like us, but without desire, how do we know who is and isn't a zombie' is the kind of problem created when one can't be sure whether a zombie with given neurological characteristics could be understood to have and not have desires, to subjectively experience pain or not. In other words, neurobiology itself might show certain facets of this thought experiment to be flawed in its parameters, and only by not currently being able to disprove its parameters are we, well, you guys, debating a thought experiment when there may very well be no point. In other words, it might be proved one day that in having the set of neurological paramaters alluded to in order to set up the thought experiment, it might not, in the evidence, be possible to sensibly argue that desire might not be present. But I don't think we know enough to be able to dispute this now. Or at least, I don't

Well, that's my first proper post, sorry if it interrupted, but I have to dive in somewhere and enjoy this debate with you all.

Adrian