Posted: May 19, 2012 9:32 am
It's perfectly logical to imagine a consciousness without a physical substrate. That's how ghosts work. Though ghosts occupy haunted houses, so it seems that ghosts require a physical location. God used to require a physical location, but was allowed to be everywhere all at once, until sophistimacated filosomizers came along and decided that God could be aspatial and atemporal. What imagination!ADParker wrote:It is currently correct. As the definition of consciousness does not currently necessarily include a physical substrate. In all probability this is a physical requirement however, making it physically impossible (to have a mind without a 'brain' of some sort), but not logically impossible. While square circle is both physically and logically impossible.
Some topologists, though, would argue that squares and circles can be precisely the same thing. The set of points equidistant from another point according to the taxi-cab metric is precisely a square circle.
Sue me if I think that the imagination of pure mathematicians here towers over those of philosophers wibbling about consciousness.