Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul by Giulio Tononi

Author:Giulio Tononi [Tononi, Giulio]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307907226
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2012-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

Most honored, Baron, said Galileo. As to the mill, if I remember well, I’ll answer the way Bruno has done (Bruno, who had not abjured, thought Galileo). To a visitor, we too are cog wheels:

They live like worms within an animal, all the animals within the World, nor do they think that the World feels anything, just as the worms in our belly do not think that we feel anything, and have a soul greater than theirs . . .

“Poetry, my dear colleague, poetry,” said the Baron, “but now it is time for logic, I found it the best of medicines! Where was I? Of course, there I was, fiat lux!” he added with a well-meaning smile, “if you don’t mind some questions. So if I may, Herr Galileo, what have you learned from the photodiode, as it were, that you may graduate to the mill? The light is on, and the photodiode turns on, what does it know? Quod noscet?”

This is what I learned, said Galileo. The photodiode has no mechanism to distinguish colored from colorless light, even less to tell which color light might be. All light is the same to it, so “light” cannot possibly mean colorless as opposed to colored, let alone colored in a particular way. Nor does the photodiode have a mechanism to distinguish between a homogeneous light and a bright shape—any bright shape—on a darker background. So “light” cannot possibly mean full-field as opposed to a shape—any of countless particular shapes. Worse, Galileo went on, the photodiode does not even know that it is detecting something visual, since it has no mechanism to tell what’s visual, such as light or dark, from what isn’t, like hot and cold, light and heavy, or loud and soft.

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