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The water melon story
The Water Melon Story
Based
on notes from a lecture on consciousness and desires by Anthony
Dickinson, Dept. of Experimental Psychology, Cambridge University
Keywords: sensory experience, conscious experience, qualia
The
highlight of Dickinson's lecture was the 'water melon story', which
recounts a real incident in Dickinson's life. During a holiday in
Sicily, Dickinson and his friends became thirsty. They went to the town
square and bought water melons. They tasted good. Water melons were a
novelty, as they had not been widely available in the UK in the mid 20th
century. That evening Dickinson drank too much and became ill. A few
days later, he went to the town square for more water melons. He was not
aware of any aversion to water melons, but when he ate one it tasted
foul, quite in contrast to his previous experience. He had developed an
aversion to water melon as a result of being ill soon after eating his
first ever water melon. He was not averse to the idea of water melon,
but to the actual experience of eating it.
Dickinson claims that
this sequence of avoidance as a result of an experience that has no
actual physical connection with the thing avoided cannot be replicated
by computers. A computer can store a one-to-one connection of water
melon as the cause of illness as a fact, but it cannot store the
experience of illness and then connect it to prior events that may or
may not be the physical cause of the illness. Conscious of an experience
such as illness is therefore argued by Dickinson to give the brain
greater flexibility there a computer that associates facts on a direct
cause and effect basis.
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