I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [205]
What about people with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia — are they still “just as Conscious” as they always were, until the moment of their death? What makes something be “the same entity” over long periods of time, anyway? Who or what decreed that the changing pattern that over several decades was variously known as “Ronnie Reagan”, “Ronald Reagan”, “Governor Reagan”, “President Reagan”, and “Ex-President Reagan” was “one single entity”? And if it truly, objectively, indisputably was one single entity no matter how ephemeral and wispy it became, then mightn’t that entity still exist?
And what about Consciousness for fetuses (or for their growing brains, even when they consist of just two neurons)? What about for cows (or their brains)? What about for goldfish (or their brains)? What about for viruses?
As I hope these lists of enigmas make clear, the questions entailed by a Capitalized Essence called “Consciousness” or élan mental abound and multiply with out end. Belief in dualism leads to a hopelessly vast and murky pit of mysteries.
Semantic Quibbling in Universe Z
There is one last matter I wish to deal with, and that has to do with Dave Chalmers’ famous zombie twin in Universe Z. Recall that this Dave sincerely believes what it is saying when it claims that it enjoys ice cream and purple flowers, but it is in fact telling falsities, since it enjoys nothing at all, since it feels nothing at all — no more than the gears in a Ferris wheel feel something as they mesh and churn. Well, what bothers me here is the uncritical willingness to say that this utterly feelingless Dave believes certain things, and that it even believes them sincerely. Isn’t sincere belief a variety of feeling? Do the gears in a Ferris wheel sincerely believe anything? I would hope you would say no. Does the float-ball in a flush toilet sincerely believe anything? Once again, I would hope you would say no.
So suppose we backed off on the sincerity bit, and merely said that Universe Z’s Dave believes the falsities that it is uttering about its enjoyment of this and that. Well, once again, could it not be argued that belief is a kind of feeling? I’m not going to make the argument here, because that’s not my point. My point is that, like so many distinctions in this complex world of ours, the apparent distinction between phenomena that do involve feelings and phenomena that do not is anything but black and white.
If I asked you to write down a list of terms that slide gradually from fully emotional and sentient to fully emotionless and unsentient, I think you could probably quite easily do so. In fact, let’s give it a quick try right here. Here are a few verbs that come to my mind, listed roughly in descending order of emotionality and sentience: agonize, exult, suffer, enjoy, desire, listen, hear, taste, perceive, notice, consider, reason, argue, claim, believe, remember, forget, know, calculate, utter, register, react, bounce, turn, move, stop. I won’t claim that my extremely short list of verbs is impeccably ordered; I simply threw it together in an attempt to show that there is unquestionably a spectrum, a set of shades of gray, concerning words that do and that do not suggest the presence of feelings behind the scenes. The tricky question then is: Which of these verbs (and comparable adjectives, adverbs, nouns, pronouns, etc.) would we be willing to apply to Dave’s zombie twin in Universe Z? Is there some precise cutoff line beyond which certain words are disallowed?