The term late error detection as such could be employed without
consciousness indeed. Yet, Jeffrey Gray gives it some special meaning
that I will try briefly describe below.
Jeffrey Gray in his book speaks about conscious experience, that is,
exactly about qualia. Self, mind, and intellect as such is not there.
He has tried first hard to put conscious experience in the framework of
the normal science (I guess that he means here physicalism) but then he
shows that conscious experience cannot be explained by the theories
within a normal science (functionalism, neural correlates of
consciousness, etc.).
According to him, conscious experience is some multipurpose display. It
is necessary yet to find how Nature produces it but at the moment this
is not that important.
He considers an organism from a cybernetic viewpoint, as a bunch of
feedback mechanisms (servomechanisms). For a servomechanism it is
necessary to set a goal and then to have a comparator that compares the
goal with the reality. It might function okay at the unconscious level
but conscious experience binds everything together in its display. This
binding happens not only between different senses (multimodal binding)
but also within a single sense (intramodel binding). For example we
consciously experience a red kite as a whole, although in the brain
lines, colors, surfaces are processed independently. Yet we cannot
consciously experience a red kite not as a whole, just try it.
Hence the conscious display gives a new opportunity to compare
expectations with reality and Jeffrey Grayrefers to it as late error
detection. That is, there is a bunch of servomechanisms that are running
on their own but then conscious experience allows brain to synchronize
everything together. This is a clear advantage from the Evolution viewpoint.
Evgenii
On 04.04.2012 09:31 Bruno Marchal said the following:
On 03 Apr 2012, at 22:38, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Apr 3, 3:56 pm, Evgenii Rudnyi <[email protected]> wrote:
On 03.04.2012 02:06 Stathis Papaioannou said the following:
...
Since there is no evolutionary advantage to consciousness it must be a
side-effect of the sort of behaviour that conscious organisms display.
Otherwise, why did we not evolve as zombies?
The evolutionary advantage of consciousness, according to Jeffrey Gray,
is late-error detection.
Why would a device need to be conscious in order to have late-error
detection?
I agree. People confuse consciousness-the-qualia, and
consciousness-the-integrating function. Stathis was talking about the
qualia. Evolution can press only on the function, a priori.
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