: I'm not sure what you mean by

: "But to get self-consciousness a kind of split consciousness is needed."

: Is this from Sagan's "Dragons of Eden" or possibly "Bocca's Brain"?

: You lost me here. Help.

I think that self-consciousnes requires one consciousness to do the thinking and another to observe that one is thinking. This is hypothetical, but it stems from the common experience that often we will do things unconsciously, so to speak. For example, when we are completely absorbed in some activity we loose all awareness of time or our environment. Then I think we are operating with a single consciousness, as I expect higher forms of non-human life do. It takes a second source of consciousness to be aware of everything including what we are thinking. Our logical thinking seems to be a classical physics effect, probably performed with collapsed quantum wave functions, whereas our awareness seems to me to be a coherent quantum effect stemming from uncollapsed wave functions that are invisible to us.

• Re: Penrose - daViper - July 15, 1999 - 19:27 UTC