"'...I drew kilometer by kilometer near to my finality.
"'I found it in a room where light shone cool from a tall thing off whose simplicity my eyes glided; I could only see that it must be an artifact, and think that most of it must be not matter but energy. Before it lay this which I now wear on my head I donned it and -
"'- there are no words, no thoughts for what came -
"'After three nights and days I ascended; and in me dwelt Caruith the Ancient.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 74-238 AT 17, pp. 206-207.
"'I can sense a mind, ancient and vast and dusty...sand blowing endlessly across endless bronze desert...
"'He...wears a golden helmet, but...but the mind I'm sensing isn't the mind of the man inside the helmet. It's...
"'J-John? I think it's the mind of the helmet itself.'"
-Alan Moore, Swamp Thing: A Murder Of Crows (New York, 2001), p. 173, panel 2, captions 2-4.
Two men, two helmets, four minds.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
If linked, physically or not, to a greater and more powerful machine, I can see smaller devices packed into a helmet, being used to imprint SOMETHING on another's mind. We already do do have some rather crude devices along those lines.
Ad astra! Sean
Yup. A mind is a pattern of information.
A pattern of information plus that elusive ingredient, consciousness.
Gentlemen,
To sum up, a mind is a pattern of information, consciousness, and MEMORY. And include volition the ability to do things, as a part of consciousness.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
"Memory" is ambiguous. A computer "memory" is not conscious. Conscious memory is, I think, a necessary part of consciousness because, if someone suffered from perpetually renewed amnesia such that at any moment he remembered no previous moment, then he would not be conscious. An experience that began and ended simultaneously would not happen just as a flat plane with zero depth does not exist.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Except that people not afflicted with the kind of amnesia you described would know what the amnesiac might have been doing from moment to moment. And the afflicted person himself would know what he was doing during those moments, before forgetting them. He would have catastrophically damaged memory, but still some remnant of memory. And thus still some consciousness.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Provided that his periods of consciousness, however brief, had some (more than zero) duration. But I think that this shows that memory is a necessary part of consciousness and need not be listed separately. Without memory, there would be no duration of consciousness and therefore no consciousness.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree. And I would stress that such unfortunates are still human beings and should be treated as such.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment