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August 03, 2007

Comments

Matthew C

Thanks for fixing the blog comments to allow formatting. You have some great first posts here.

where consciousness emerges several years after the system exists

By consciousness are you referring to awareness, perception and experience or to the personal sense of self?

Hopefully Anonymous

MatthewC, thanks for the compliment. I defer to the neuroscientist experts on the exact distinctions of which subjective mental phenomena appear several years after a neuronal system of some format exists, and which appear earlier than "several years". But they all seem to appear sometime after a human (or pre-human set of cells) has a bunch of neurons in a networked system.

So, I think it's possible that subjective conscious entities, with at least personal sense of self (and perhaps awareness and perception) emerge some time period after a bunch of humans form a networked system.

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