The fortunate aspect is that once a person learns that his / her preferences are being guided by
methods of evaluative conditioning, in order to influence the person to have positive
associations with negative stimuli (or feel powerless towards the negative stimuli); and that
the stimulus (brand / product) does in fact cause undesirable consequences –then the ‘spell’ is
broken. The person can now choose how he or she responds to the brand etc. Usually, once
all is known: a negative stimulus is associated with negative associations; despite it being
portrayed as positive through evaluative conditioning.
Consciousness Transfer
Consciousness is defined as “the state of being aware of and responsive to one’s
surroundings; a person’s awareness or perception of something” (Dictionary Reference
2015). Consciousness can also be described as: individual awareness of a person’s unique
thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and environment (Cherry 2015).
John Locke (1632-1704) was an English philosopher, Oxford academic and medical
researcher who argues that it is sameness of consciousness rather than sameness of substance
that constitutes personal identity. Consequently, if the psychological life is transferred from
the body of a prince to the body of a cobbler (shoe mender), Locke argues, the resulting
person will be the prince and not the cobbler. He would be responsible for the prince’s
actions and not the cobbler’s; those who were close to the prince could continue their
relationships with him but those who had relationships with the cobbler could not, and so on
(Schechtman 2012, p.334). Moreover, basic Lockean intuition has proved to be that
“consciousness transfer” can be thought of as the feat in which the person moves from one
body into another (Schechtman 2012, p.334).
Consciousness transfer can also be thought of as the process of transferring or copying the
mental content (including long-term memory and “self”) from a particular brain and copying
it to a computational device; artificial body or avatar body such as that of a robot or clone
version of the original.
The computation device, robot or the clone, will then respond
essentially the same way as the original brain (as suggested by Lockean theory on
consciousness transfer) and therefore the computational device, robot or clone experiences
having a conscious mind and essentially the behaviour of the computational device, robot or
clone, can be attributed as belonging to that of the original.
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