posted
I just finished reading I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter's latest book. It's a fascinating read, and it got me thinking about consciousness in a more explicit manner than I'm used to. His theory of consciousness (which I'll get to in a minute) for the most part rings true to me, but I've always been a materialist and I wonder how convincing he would be to someone who prefers dualism.
Some sections of the book, particularly the ones where he directly refutes his critics' arguments, actually managed to annoy me, and I'm sympathetic to his arguments! If he tried posting his arguments on a forum like Hatrack he'd face much stiffer opposition than his strawmen. The chapters in dialogue form were the worst in this respect (and I loved his dialogues in Gödel, Escher, Bach).
I thought I'd give the naysayers a fairer chance in this thread. So if you're a dualist, or you believe in objective qualia, or if you believe in a non-material soul, I'd like to hear from you what your view of consciousness is. Note: I'm certainly not here to ridicule people for their beliefs, nor am I particularly interested in changing minds. This is simply a topic that I am extremely interested in.
Here's Hofstadter's theory, in a nutshell (I'll try to do it justice): consciousness is an illusion. The human brain and many other animal brains are capable of mirroring external (and internal) information in patterns of neural activity that we'll call symbols. The human brain has the (unique? certainly distinguished) property that it has an arbitrarily extensible way of refering to symbols and relationships between them, which is manifested in our language and its recursive grammatical structures. Each human brain has symbols for other people and by analogy has a symbol for itself. This self-symbol is an example of what Hofstadter calls a strange loop: a paradoxical situation in which if you continue to move up (or down) in a hierarchy you ultimately end up where you started. Examples are Escher's Drawing Hands, Shepherd Tones, or Gödel's self-referential formula in his proof of his first incompleteness theorem.
The feeling of consciousness, the intentionality that accompanies your deliberate actions, the sense of being in a certain location, the sense of perceiving things, these are all convenient fictions. They are simply a strategy that your brain has come up with for functioning in this world. Or perhaps this illusion is programmed into us by our genetic code and our development, just like our tendency to see a three-dimensional object when we encounter a drawing of a necker cube (or that spinning dancer gif that was linked here a while ago).
Sometimes I find myself wondering, "why am I me? could I have been someone else? could I have been your little sister? what would it be like if, all of a sudden, I somehow traded places with that guy passing by in that car over there, and I live his life and he lives mine?" I think I've come a little closer to understanding and even partially answering these questions. One of the most compelling images I've taken from the book is that we have the ability to internalize other people's selves into our own brains. We can do this on a superficial level by learning facts about and simple preferences of other people, but perhaps there is a point where two people know each other well enough that each person's internal symbol of the other becomes a bona fide strange loop. Like a video camera pointed at a monitor carrying its own signal, suddenly rather than seeing only one or two nested copies of the monitor you see an entire infinite corridor, and the other person's I-ness takes up residence in your head.
Meaningful? useful? I don't know. But it sure is interesting to think about.
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quote:why am I me? could I have been someone else? could I have been your little sister?
listen to Dave Matthews much?
I just recently finished "The Mind's I" which was done by Hofstadter and Dennett together. If you haven't read it I highly recommend it. And I started "Gödel, Escher, Bach" but only just.
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I'm not sure I understand. If you're conscious when they perform surgery on you, you feel it. If they knock you out first, you don't.
Wouldn't that be evidence of the existence of seperate states if they behave differntly in the same situation?
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I enjoyed reading Gödel, Escher, Bach* by Douglas Hofstadter. The latest book I haven't found yet.
The idea that consciousness is a Strange Loop (as defined by Hofstadter) is interesting, but what I'd really like to see is an application of it in AI.
Think about it: if we produce an "intelligent" program that can "see itself", and then behave as any conscious human, it would be very informative on the "soul" matter. I think that just passing the Touring Test won't make AI advance much. Yet being able to implement a Strange Loop would.
A.
*I have actually read two versions of it, the English and the French one. Believe it or not, they are two different books, on many levels.(They say basically the same thing, but in quite distinct manners!)
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I'm a materialist, and share many of Hofstadter's opinions. That said, I don't think it's possible to set up a second "strange loop" within your own brain in an attempt to understand someone else. You might be able to send symbols through a loop that's a fairly good approximation of their perspective, but it will always lack the direct intentionality and self-awareness of your own loop; you might understand someone really well, to the extent that you're soulmates -- but you won't suddenly start thinking you're them. There will always be a layer of self-referentiality that, in the absence of a physical referent for the Other's senses and stored history, will prevent perfect empathy.
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quote:Here's Hofstadter's theory, in a nutshell (I'll try to do it justice): consciousness is an illusion.
Therein lies the general problem with materialist "loop" theories: In order to have an illusion, there must actually exist a consciousness to experience the illusion. Therefore, if consciousness itself were an illusion, there would be nothing to experience that illusion, and thus we end up in a contradiction.
Eliminitivist materialism of this sort always seems to rely on the notion that if you make a model really really really complicated sounding, people will be confused enough to accept that it could lead to magical behavior that there's really no reason to believe should follow from the model. It does explain why people ACT like they are conscious, and it does explain why people TALK like they are conscious, but it definitely does not really explain why you EXPERIENCE the illusion of consciousness. It could only explain robots that act and speak like they are conscious, but don't actually experience any illusion of consciousness. This problem tends to be buried under talk of countless loops and the confusing complexity of the brain. But eliminitivist materialism always solves the problem in the same way, even if it does tend to hide the solution - by denying the obvservably true fact that we actually do experience the illusion of consciousness.
My view of the mind is connected to my view of how we know things. As I see it, we come into the world with "experience" as our only means of knowing anything about the world. We can see, smell, taste, feel, etc. For this reason, the things that we most directly know exist are our experiences: the images we see, the sensations we feel - things with qualia. As we grow up we then infer the existence of the physical world in order to explain how are experiences remain consistent. For instance, you might play "peek-a-boo" with an adult, and every time you remove your hands from your eyes the adult is still standing there - leading you to quickly infer that the adult is more than just some experience; you conclude that the adult must exist as a physical thing outside your mind that keeps giving you experiences. In this way we know directly that experience (and qualia) exists, and then infer indirectly that physical things exist.
For that reason, I don't think we can expect to go backwards in that process - to infer from physical things that experience exists. It may not be possible to do so. But we would nevertheless know for certain that experience does exist, because we rely upon our experience to reach every conclusion we have about the physical world. If experience didn't exist, we would have no access at all to the physical world at all. It is the only medium through which we can observe and understand the material universe.
Therefore we must begin with the assumption that experience does exist. And experience entails consciousness along with it.
There have been attempts to try to define experience and consciousness as physical things, but I have never been able to buy the notion that those are sorts of things that can be built out of atoms. It seems to me that either consciousness must exist as something nonphysical, or it must not exist at all. And since (for the earlier reasons) we know consciousness exists, we know something nonphysical exists. For that reason, I am a dualist.
That is not to say that nonphysical consciousness "floats" in some alternate nonphysical dimension, or exists in some ghostly form, or something bizarre-sounding like that. Rather, it may just be another element to the universe, just like time and matter are elements to the universe. I suspect that eventually someone will come up with a model to talk about it in a more concrete fashion. But I don't know how yet - and I'm not going to deny it exists just because we are only in the beginning stages of understanding it.
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quote:In order to have an illusion, there must actually exist a consciousness to experience the illusion.
This isn't a chicken/egg problem, you realize. In this case, the illusion doesn't exist until it does, and in existing it becomes perceptible. You don't need to have one without the other; they can simultaneously enable each other.
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I don't think that is true. You need an actual consciousness to experience an illusion. An illusion can't actually experience an illusion, since it is just an illusion after all. If it were to actually start experiencing things, it would no longer be an illusion - it would be the real thing!
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quote:If it were to actually start experiencing things, it would no longer be an illusion - it would be the real thing!
Yes. It would be a real illusion. Unless you're defining "real" as "able to experience things," there's no reason an illusion can't experience things. To clarify: experience is itself a function of the internal context. Since it shares a context with illusion (i.e. both are "real" in the internal context), they are completely compatible.
quote:Originally posted by Strider: listen to Dave Matthews much?
I will put The Mind's I on my list.
quote:Originally posted by AvidReader: I'm not sure I understand. If you're conscious when they perform surgery on you, you feel it. If they knock you out first, you don't.
Wouldn't that be evidence of the existence of seperate states if they behave differntly in the same situation?
Yes, consciousness and unconsciousness are separate states. I suppose the difference between them is that when you are rendered unconscious, certain parts of your brain are deactivated, and this temporarily breaks the feedback loop that is your self-symbol (and breaks a lot of other functionality too).
quote:Originally posted by suminonA: The idea that consciousness is a Strange Loop (as defined by Hofstadter) is interesting, but what I'd really like to see is an application of it in AI.
AI applications could be interesting for sure, but I don't think we're going to see anything magical right away.
quote: *I have actually read two versions of it, the English and the French one. Believe it or not, they are two different books, on many levels.(They say basically the same thing, but in quite distinct manners!)
I can imagine! I wish I were fluent in languages other than English so I could experience this for myself. Though experiencing it through you vicariously is better than nothing.
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I'm a materialist, and share many of Hofstadter's opinions. That said, I don't think it's possible to set up a second "strange loop" within your own brain in an attempt to understand someone else. You might be able to send symbols through a loop that's a fairly good approximation of their perspective, but it will always lack the direct intentionality and self-awareness of your own loop; you might understand someone really well, to the extent that you're soulmates -- but you won't suddenly start thinking you're them. There will always be a layer of self-referentiality that, in the absence of a physical referent for the Other's senses and stored history, will prevent perfect empathy.
Hofstadter mentions a case where a pair identical twins live together and identify themselves as a single person. A recent article on the Chaplin twins: http://archive.thenorthernecho.co.uk/2007/9/25/238425.html . I'm not saying you necessarily start believing you are the other person. There is simply enough feedback between the two that A knows how B acts in a certain situation, and B knows that A knows this, and acts accordingly, and A knows that B will act with this knowledge, and B knows that A knows, and on and on. There's certainly a loss of fidelity and a chance of error at each step, but that is true of your self-symbol as well. How well do you know yourself? How well do you have to know yourself in order to be conscious?
quote:Originally posted by Tresopax:
quote:Here's Hofstadter's theory, in a nutshell (I'll try to do it justice): consciousness is an illusion.
Therein lies the general problem with materialist "loop" theories: In order to have an illusion, there must actually exist a consciousness to experience the illusion. Therefore, if consciousness itself were an illusion, there would be nothing to experience that illusion, and thus we end up in a contradiction.
Tres, I thought you might have a different take on things.
Question for you: how do you know, or what makes you believe, that experience is not a physical thing? It's certainly counterintuitive, the idea of experience and consciousness being purely physical phenomena, but that doesn't necessarily make it wrong. Our intuition is notoriously unreliable when it comes to certain topics.
quote:That is not to say that nonphysical consciousness "floats" in some alternate nonphysical dimension, or exists in some ghostly form, or something bizarre-sounding like that. Rather, it may just be another element to the universe, just like time and matter are elements to the universe. I suspect that eventually someone will come up with a model to talk about it in a more concrete fashion. But I don't know how yet - and I'm not going to deny it exists just because we are only in the beginning stages of understanding it.
This is interesting, and I'd like to hear more about it. In what sense is consciousness another element to the universe, separate from (or perhaps connected to) the physical appearance of consciousness that you alluded to above ("It does explain why people ACT like they are conscious, and it does explain why people TALK like they are conscious...")?
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quote:Originally posted by Mike: This is interesting, and I'd like to hear more about it. In what sense is consciousness another element to the universe, separate from (or perhaps connected to) the physical appearance of consciousness that you alluded to above ("It does explain why people ACT like they are conscious, and it does explain why people TALK like they are conscious...")?
quote:Originally posted by suminonA: The idea that consciousness is a Strange Loop (as defined by Hofstadter) is interesting, but what I'd really like to see is an application of it in AI.
AI applications could be interesting for sure, but I don't think we're going to see anything magical right away.
Im not talking about anything magic. But when is an entity self-conscious?
I think about it like this: When you are very young, you simply experience things. Maybe no conscious thought is formed in a three months old baby, but soon the recognition of patterns arises. (Is it a sign of consciousness?) A baby will recognize the mother that is around every single day, but wont react much to the uncle that visits every other month. Incidentally, this is how newborns learn language too: pattern recognition and association. Then, at some point, the moment the question of why (do I experience this)? arises in the mind (I think the what? question comes much later). I think this is probably the huge step toward conscience. I wont go further for now, I just want to point out that I suspect this basic curiosity is what separates conscience mode from pure experience mode.
Now, the recognition of patterns was already successfully integrated in AI (cf. neural networks). Yet they are still far from being self-aware. If we can implement a Strange Loop (I have no idea how ) in an artificial system and we notice that the question of WHY? arises without pre-programming it, then I think we might just give birth to the first artificial conscience.
This might sound very far-fetched, but it was the main question that Hofstadters GEB inspired in me: What would a self-aware AI system do once it became operational? (I say it will ask the question: "WHY?")
quote:there's no reason an illusion can't experience things
I definitely don't agree with that claim.
quote:Question for you: how do you know, or what makes you believe, that experience is not a physical thing?
Because it doesn't share any of the properties that other physical things possess. I can't construct it out of particles. Other people can't observe it. It doesn't exist anywhere in physical space. If it isn't in any way like other physical things, I don't see how it could be considered physical, unless the term is to be made completely meaningless.
quote:This is interesting, and I'd like to hear more about it. In what sense is consciousness another element to the universe, separate from (or perhaps connected to) the physical appearance of consciousness that you alluded to above ("It does explain why people ACT like they are conscious, and it does explain why people TALK like they are conscious...")?
Well I think "dualism" is sort of a misnomer because even materialist positions on the universe seem to think that there is more than one type of thing. For instance, consider space and matter - neither seems to be made of the other. Both of these are separate fundamental entities. And both are interconnected with the other. Conscious experience may be something fundamental akin to space and matter, which is in some way interconnected with space and matter but is not built out of space and matter. The link orlox gave to Chalmers has some more about this sort of stance. Chalmers seems to think we could treat conscious experience in a way similar to matter, and figure out rules through which it behaves, etc.
Going off on a random tangent... Imagine a world where matter existed but no space existed. I can't really imagine such a world as meaning anything at all. Such a thing might possibly exist, in theory, but without space to spread matter out, it wouldn't really be anything meaningful at all. Similarly, imagine a world with space but no matter. You could say such a universe might exist, but without any matter I'm not sure what possible significance it has.
In a similar fashion, I don't think the universe as we know it would have any significance at all if conscious experience were not a component of it. Atoms, by themselves, have no significance. They become significant because they come together to form objects that we can observe and experience. When they create the smell of apple pie, the sight of a tree, or the sound of music, atoms because real, meaningful things. But if there were no conscious experience in the world, they'd just be abstractions.
So, my thought is that consciousness is an essential element of the existence of things - going back to my description earlier of how I think we know things. We only know physical things exist because we infer it from our conscious experiences. If we were to take consciousness out of the universe, you could still say the particles exist in some sense, but I'm not sure how their existence would be anything other than a meaningless abstraction - like looking at the Matrix in only 1's and 0's.
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It's a book of collected essays and short stories by science fiction authors, philosophers, scientists, etc...all dealing with consciousness and the self. After each selection either Hofstadter or Dennett write up a little commentary. It's pretty awesome. Dennett signed my copy of it. Now if I can get Hofstadter to do the same that would be really cool!
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Eh, I haven't studied epistemology yet, and really don't feel like reading up on it until I finish ethics, aesthetics, and a few other things. I heard that Nagel's essay, "What is it Like to be a Bat" is amazing, though.
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I don't understand the strange loop idea. But the link between awareness and recursive grammar is terribly interesting.
What if we are no more able to understand ourselves than we are able to understand anyone else?
I'm not sure if I'm a dualist or a materialist. The people who identify as materialists seem to be a group I don't share much world view with.
But I ponder the matter of what dies at the time of death quite a bit, and I seem to have different ideas about it from my mom. Like, if someone were a ghost and could pass through solid matter, why wouldn't they fall through the ground? This has always really bugged me. I don't know, maybe hell really is down, and heaven up.
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The problem with saying that consciousness is an illusion is this (I'm taking this from the David Chalmers book and articles linked to above, which I've read before). Even if you know exactly how the brain stores information in patterns of neural activity, it doesn't logically follow that that neural activity is sights, sounds, etc. It could follow from the laws of nature; in fact, it's most reasonable to assume that, since you're conscious, other humans, who have very similar brain structures, are conscious like you. But it doesn't follow from the description of neurons that the neurons are states of consciousness; you have to already know you're conscious before you can infer that. So you can't completely explain consciousness just by mapping the brain; you need to add some natural laws that say when consciousness arises in nature.
Pieces of matter could still be "made of" units of experience, but you wouldn't be be able to tell that from the kinds of studies that are done in physics as we typically think of it. And this view doesn't say anything about whether consciousness can exist without any accompanying matter, or whether there are any immaterial souls that can control people's bodies and do similar things.
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I don't think consciousness is the "soul" or spirit anyway. I think it is the mind, and I think the mind and everything it does dies at death.
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quote:Because it doesn't share any of the properties that other physical things possess. I can't construct it out of particles. Other people can't observe it. It doesn't exist anywhere in physical space. If it isn't in any way like other physical things, I don't see how it could be considered physical, unless the term is to be made completely meaningless.
The claim that you cannot construct consciousness out of particles is circular. I can construct a brain out of particles, and I claim that this brain will be conscious. Your claim that something more is needed cannot be advanced as evidence for the opposite!
I certainly do observe consciousness in other people, not with perfect certainty perhaps, but I do observe it. And I defy you to be conscious in any place other than where your brain happens to be located.
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I love Hofstadter but I haven't read this one yet. My thought about all such models that purport to explain consciousness is that there's that crucial single arm-waving step where they leap from the physical processes, which make lots of sense, like neurons, processing, layers, grandmother cells, and the behavior of neural nets to ----------------(here's the leap)--------------> the subjective experience of seeing something. And there is just nothing that bridges that gap. No explanation at all. They just say a causes b. Neuron behavior causes the sensation of vision. But no "how" is given. The one simply doesn't follow from the other.
There has to be someone inside to whom to present all this information that's being collected and processed.
I'm not really a dualist, though. I think it's all material, body, mind, and spirit, but it's just material way beyond our current level of physical understanding. Obviously if I can make my body do stuff, there has to be a physical interface between me and it. There has to be some signal getting through. So there IS a me, and I am material in some way, but just not in a way we understand yet.
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I think the issue with saying there needs to be a "how" an interface between me and it, is that "you" are "it." It's not that electrical signals created by seeing something are then processed and sent somewhere where you watch them proceed on a little internal movie theater showing the visual from your experience. It seems to make more sense to just say that those electrical signals ARE seeing. they ARE sight in the same way that electricity applied directly to the brain makes you experience colors or memories. Hmm. Too many unanswered questions... This is why I'm interested in the brain (among other reasons)
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quote:Here's Hofstadter's theory, in a nutshell (I'll try to do it justice): consciousness is an illusion.
Therein lies the general problem with materialist "loop" theories: In order to have an illusion, there must actually exist a consciousness to experience the illusion. Therefore, if consciousness itself were an illusion, there would be nothing to experience that illusion, and thus we end up in a contradiction.
That is exactly what I was going to say only more clearly expressed.
I will add a few things.
When I say I believe in a self, and that it has nonmaterial aspects, this is not supernaturalism necessarily. After all, numbers aren't material and they also aren't supernatural. Except the numbers in GEB that Hofstadter labeled "supernatural."
I will also add something about elimination whether this is what "eliminationism" means or not. Philosophers often try this: they say, let's cease to believe in X, and look how much simpler it is to explain the world, or how much nicer the world is. And this is OK as long as it's a convenience. The trouble is if you go further and disbelieve in X without good reason.
For example Marx told us to stop believing in those aspects of history that are not class struggle. It simplifies the world, but the new and simpler world isn't real.
Logical positivists told us to stop believing in statements that were not tautology, scientifically verifiable, or nonsense, but this made us cease to believe that the statement "logical positivism" is true meant anything.
John Lennon told us the world would be nicer if we stopped believing in God, the afterlife, and national identity. But if these things exist, they exist whether we believe in them or not.
Hofstadter now tells us to stop believing in consciousness. But if we do, who is it that decided to stop believing? This is a strange loop indeed.
Shakespeare had it right. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in various philosophies, because philosophies oversimplify the world in order to understand it. But if they tell us not to ignore things for the time being but to assume they don't exist, that's too simplified.
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I think the mind is a system, just as the alimentary tract is a system. We take things in, we benefit or suffer by them, and things are expelled. As I try to dispense with the reality of consciousness, my mind protests "but things happen! Reality is happening! Time is happening."
Ah, time. Does the spirit know time? Does God know time? Consciousness may be a homeostasis between time and eternity, just as we live in a homeostasis between hunger and satiety, between rest and activity and a million other alternating states. There is time and there is memory, one moving forward, the other trying to remain fixed; one progressing, the other struggling not to lose what is of value.
I was a compulsive thinker, just as I was a compulsive eater. I tried not to feel anger. I imagined identities for the people around me and for myself. I was not receptive to the effects of my choices, but returned to the same poisons over and over which would shut out the things I did not want to think about. I looked for suggestive elements in children's shows, thinking this was vigilance. I consumed the religion of refining fire and fuller's soap, trying to bleach my soul.
Of course no one likes to talk about what happens at the other end of the alimentary process, but for me it looked like fears of whether I'd back the car over a passing child, whether my children would fall out of the car at highway speed, wondering why there were so many cars parked near that playground bathroom at lunchtime, and what went on at that gray church with the pentagram window.
Yadda yadda, I learned to see these things as symptoms. I realized that the products of my thought choices are not my thoughts, but my actions.
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quote:Originally posted by Qaz: Hofstadter now tells us to stop believing in consciousness. But if we do, who is it that decided to stop believing? This is a strange loop indeed.
I don't think he's telling us to stop believing in consciousness as such. Let me put it this way (and this is his analogy that I'm borrowing): the laws of thermodynamics are actually not laws at all. They are approximations that are derived from the statistical behavior of immense quantities of elementary particles. If you are looking at things on the scale of a molecule, macroscopic ideas like "heat" and "pressure" don't really have any meaning. If you play a Beethoven sonata on your hi fi system, the precise locations of every air molecule in the room are irrelevant to the sound that we hear (there are innumerable configurations that would cause the same large-scale effect), yet at the same time those air molecules are the things that are causing your eardrum to vibrate and your brain to register the sound.
My point is that it isn't necessary to stop believing in the existence of the Beethoven sonata (though Hofstadter would probably prefer Chopin) even though there is nothing physical you can point to and say, "this is the sonata". It's not so much that consciousness doesn't exist as it isn't quite what you think it is. And I'm not singling you out here: consciousness isn't quite what I think it is either.
Anyway, I don't think we have to throw out our ideas of human experience and intentionality simply because there is a purely physical model for it. We still use the laws of thermodynamics, because they're too useful to discard. Same with our perception of subjective experience.
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Mike, if we have a perception of subjective experience, but not ACTUAL subjective experience, who is the one doing the perceiving?
Science, which specifically limits itself to objective, repeatable observations can't deal with consciousness because it is simply outside science's domain. So it's being as wise here as a religious prophet who declares from revelation that the stars shine by reflected light from our sun.
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quote:Science, which specifically limits itself to objective, repeatable observations can't deal with consciousness because it is simply outside science's domain.
Unless, of course, consciousness has a physical, scientific cause. Which I happen to believe, so... Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Objectivity is problematic, of course, so that is not how I conceptualize science at all. That notion broke down on the quantum level yet we still persist in doing science. Including the study of consciousness.
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How can something that only deals with objective observations have anything at all to say about something that is by definition a subjective experience?
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quote:How can something that only deals with objective observations have anything at all to say about something that is by definition a subjective experience?
If consciousness is an illusion, so is subjectivity.
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To avoid the risk of being quoted as "that idiot from the 21st century" who said that there is no physical explanation of consciousness when somebody figures it out, I do not hold that belief/support that idea. I give our race more credit than that, and feel that some time in the future, somebody will figure out how this crazy contraption called a brain works and makes me me and a bat a bat.
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A friend of mine was blogging about robots and christianity,
quote:Memories, interpretations of memories, and the completeness of all data gathered by their sensorium, all of these things would be transferrable from one "individual" to another. They would have the capacity of truly knowing the "other" as themselves, in other words, and that would radically inform their nature and orientation towards other beings.
Our underlying monkey-fear of AI has always been that they'll be smarter and stronger than us. But what if they're also better Christians?
This got me thinking:
And if things are fully transferable, would this not apply equally to the bad as the good? Or is consciousness just considered an obsolete state of being? I think an Artificial Intelligence would have to have something like consciousness, a seemingly chaotic stewpot of ideas from which something suitable to a situation can be adopted. Without such a resource, a robot would just respond the same way to any stimulus that resembles prior stimulus. Then it would be a bigot robot. Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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What we call Consciousness is simply incredibly complex neural interactions. It's all meat and electricity.
A fertilized egg clearly not conscious, yet an adult human is. Consciousness is simply a point in the increasingly complex system where the brain is able to process at a level where the idea of consciousness has meaning.
If there is some non-physical Thing which must be added to the fertilized egg, beyond the natural growth of the system, at what point, and by what means is this incorporeal Consciousness added?
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quote:How can something that only deals with objective observations have anything at all to say about something that is by definition a subjective experience?
If consciousness is an illusion, so is subjectivity.
I'm pretty sure that I'm conscious, but if I were being fooled into thinking so, what is there to have the notion that it is conscious? And what does it matter that we think we are not machines if we are merely machines?
I am unconscious of you, I am conscious of myself. Of the whole world but one person, everyone is unconscious. All they perceive of anyone else is experience and reactions. We do not experience that which is called subjective of anyone but ourselves, which is the extent of our consciousness.
I'd write more, but I really should go to church, and by the time I come back there would be significant thread drift.
Posts: 1029 | Registered: Apr 2007
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