Paul and Alfred--
Strange that the conversation should take this turn. It moves squarely
into what I teach about, but have not written about vis a vis
communication, coordination/discoordination, and consciousness.
Right, deprive humans of meaningful stimulation by floating them in
warm tanks filled with white noise. In a few days at most they cannot
add 2 and 2.
I would call that perfect discoordination, ramdomness.
What about the other extreme, perfect coordination? We know what happens
in these circumstances from experiments fixing images on retinas--
the visual world disappears to replaced by a gray, uniform field.
In the book of laughter and forgetting, where all these topics
are themed and varied, Pascal is quoted as saying that "life is
lived between the infinitely large and infinitely small." Yep,
temporally too.
mike
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