Stephen King wrote: > >>PS, to Russell: I think that you are conflating consciousness > >>with self-awareness in section 9.5 of your book. <wlEmoticon- > >>sadsmile[1].png> The two are not the same thing. Consciousness > >>is purely passive. Self-awareness is active in that is involves > >>the continuous modeling (passive consciousness) with the > >>continuous act of choosing between alternatives (free will).
I missed this comment earlier. It surprised me, as I do not conflate the two (self awareness requires consciousness, but consciousness without self-awareness is at least conceivable). Section 9.5 is about evolutionary explanations of self-awareness and free will, so is not about the more general phenomenon of consciousness at all. However, maybe you thought I was conflating the two in the very last sentence: "I can conclude in agreement with Dennett that consciousness is an extremely rare property ion the animal kingdom". If this were only based on section 9.5, then this would be overreaching conclusions from the mirror test and Macchiavellian theory. But I also base the comment on the anthropic "ants are not conscious argument" (section 5.4), which is about the more general concept of consciousness, not just self-awareness, and also the Occam catastrophe argument (page 84) leads to a (tentative) conclusion that self-awareness is actually required for consciousness after all. It is one of the more contentious conclusions of the book, so I'm happy for that to be pulled apart and debated, -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
