Le 18-juin-06, à 15:59, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
> I should clarify, I have taken "amnesia in Moscow" as meaning that you
> arrive in Moscow with a proportion of your pre-teleportation memories
> missing, so that total amnesia would mean you are unconscious or in a
> vegetative state, as after a severe head injury. On re-reading, I see
> that you probably meant that you are fully conscious in Moscow, but
> then forget some or all of what happened in Moscow (but not in
> Brussels) at your next destination. Actually, analogous situations
> occur all the time with medical procedures involving the use of
> amnesia-inducing drugs such as midazolam. Faced with the prospect of a
> procedure which you know will ultimately be wiped from your memory,
> should you expect an unpleasant experience, or should you expect to
> just wake up post-operatively with a gap in your memory? If the
> latter, then if you expect to become demented when you are very old,
> shouldn't you stop worrying about anything that might happen between
> now and then?
I believe this is an important and hard question, which has extremely
counter-intuitive answer (with comp).
Actually, the marquis de Sade (a famous mechanist philosopher, alas
also, following la Mettrie, a famous materialist!) actually reason like
that. If you expect to be demented or just to be dead, nothing between
now and then should be a matter of concern. So Sade proposed that life
belongs to the most egoist kind of people living just for the present
instant.
But comp is incompatible with materialism: we just cannot die in any
absolute way, nor to be sure we will be demented in the normal
(gaussian) futures.
We can also interpret Sade as a proof by contradiction of the falsity
of materialism .... (?)
We should talk again on Midazolam, but be very cautious with the
fusing/amnesia sort of arguments. Difficult matter.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Mon Jun 19 2006 - 06:19:04 PDT