Milinda’s Questions

(go here for an explanation of that heading)

Philosopher Pete Mandik was interviewed for an article on consciousness in vegetative patients in today’s Wall Street Journal; Pete tells us about it at Philosophy of Brains. Apparently when you give verbal instructions to vegetative patients telling them to imagine doing certain things, there’s activity in the brain areas associated with those tasks. Pete’s take:

I think that if the same activity also shows up in patients under general anesthesia, then that activity doesn’t suffice for consciousness. The proposal that people under general anesthetic are conscious after all is an intolerable skeptical hypothesis (do you really want to believe that people suffer their major surgeries?).

On the contrary, I don’t see any problem with saying that there are levels or degrees of consciousness, and such of consciousness as persist in anesthetized states are too low-level, or perhaps just of the wrong sort, to permit the experiencing of pain.