On Oct 22, 2:34 pm, "Michael Rosefield" <rosyatran....domain.name.hidden>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> 1) My thoughts are that an act of euthanasia would be more likely to 'push'
> the consciousness of the patient to some hitherto unlikely scenario - any
> situation where death is probable requires an improbable get-out clause. The
> patient may well find themselves in a world where their suffering is
> curable/has been cured. Might even be brains-in-jars time.
I'm inclined to think that injecting someone with something nasty is
likely to do more damage than good, even if they are already in
insufferable distress. Its hard for me to envisage a situation where I
might advocate euthanasia given that the patient will probably suffer
more every time.
>
> 2) I think that neural systems possess a quality called something like
> 'graceful decline;' the brain can undergo a lot of random damage before its
> function is significantly affected. But once it does start to go down the
> toilet, I'm not sure what the conscious experience of that would be.
> Presumably it would be something like Alzheimers or a pretty bad case of the
> mornings, and everything would appear to be rather scattershot and
> disconnected. From the perspective of the victim (I would say 'patient'
> again, but let's face it - this is one mean scenario!) I wonder if this
> weakens the connection to this particular context, and they'd find it more
> likely to move in the direction of universes in which the process is
> reversed or nullified.
Yes, I think I agree with you. But its hard to imagine what form this
base level of conscious experience would be like. I guess, if QTI can
equally apply to non-human animals and there is a continuum of what
might be regarded as 'consciousness' from humans down to unicellar
organisms, there is a cut-off point at which the organism is not
really experiencing anything and so can "die" and that the victim of
the experiment has a brain state similar to the conscious organism
arrived at just before this cut-off is reached.
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Received on Thu Oct 23 2008 - 10:26:50 PDT