“Beneath all this technicality is
the feeling that it is indeed ‘obvious’ that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer, even though much of what is
actually involved in mental activity might do so.
This is the kind of obviousness that a child can see ~ though that child may, in later life, become browbeaten into
believing that the obvious problems are ‘non-problems’, to be argued into nonexistence by careful reasoning and clever
chores of definition.
Children sometimes see things clearly that are indeed obscured in later life. We often forget the
wonder that we felt as children when the cares of the activities of the ‘real world’ have begun to settle upon our
shoulders.
Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask. What happens to
each of our streams of consciousness after we die; where was it before each was born;
might we become, or have been, someone else; why do we perceive at all; why are we here; why is there a universe
here at all in which we can actually be?
These are puzzles that tend to come with the awakenings of awareness in any one of us and, no doubt, with the
awakening of genuine self-awareness, within whichever creature or other entity it first came.
I remember, myself, being troubled by many such puzzles as a child.
Perhaps my own consciousness might suddenly get exchanged with someone else’s. How would I ever know whether
such a thing might not have happened to me earlier assuming that each person carries only the memories pertinent to
that particular person? How could I explain such an ‘exchange’ experience to someone else? Does it really mean
anything?
Perhaps I am simply living the same ten minutes’ experiences over and over again, each time with exactly the same
perceptions. Perhaps only the present instant ‘exists’ for me. Perhaps the The’ of tomorrow, or of yesterday, is really a
quite different person with an independent consciousness.
Perhaps I am actually living backwards in time, with my
stream of consciousness heading into the past, so my memory really-tells me what is going to happen to me rather than
what has happened to me so that unpleasant experience at school is really something that is in store for me and I shall,
unfortunately, shortly actually encounter.
Does the distinction between that and the normally experienced timeprogression
actually ‘mean’ something, so that the one is ‘wrong’ and the other ‘right’? For the answers to such
questions to be resolvable in principle, a theory of consciousness would be needed. But how could one even begin to
explain the substance of such problems to an entity that was notitself conscious;; ?”
Fra boken Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics av Roger Penrose som kan kjøpes her https://www.adlibris.com/no/e-bok/emperors-new-mind-concerning-computers-minds-and-the-laws-of-physics-9780191506413
