On 8/19/2014 4:44 PM, LizR wrote:
On 20 August 2014 04:16, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
wrote:
If your altered state of consciousness has no self-awareness, is it still
"consciousness"? And there's self-consciousness, i.e. being aware you are
thinking. So it's not 'fading' qualia, it different categories of consciousness.
I'd say my dog has self-awareness, e.g. he knows his name. But I'm not so sure he is
self-conscious. The koi in my pond are aware, but I doubt they are
self-aware.
So this is all that Brent means by degrees of consciousness,
No, there might also be other differences, although Bruno would no doubt disagree.
Consider my example of the autonomous Mars Rover, suppose that instead of summarizing
things into a narrative memory and then reconstructing remembered events, as people seem
to, it simply recorded everything and played back segments when it remembered. ISTM this
might make a difference in kind. Or suppose there were many Mars Rover at different
locations and were controlled by the same program. They would have different kind of
sense of location.
after all the waving it in everyone's faces as though it had huge explanatory power,
it's now been reduced to whether or not an organism knows certain things about itself.
This looks to me like a lot of backpedalling on what started out as a rather grandiose
concept,
Why would different kinds of consciousness be a grandiose concept?
but which has now ended up as something fairly trivial. So koi carp don't have a concept
of self (who would have thought it? What fools you've been in the all-or-nothing camp
not to realise that!)
But it now appears that Brent just stepped out of the "consciousness continuum" camp
(from thermostats, according to Dan Dennet, to us) and into the
"either-conscious-or-not" camp. Is someone going to welcome him?
Bruno thinks there's a good chance the algae in my pond is conscious, so he probably
agrees that my thermostat might be too.
Brent
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