On 20 Aug 2014, at 02:27, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/19/2014 4:44 PM, LizR wrote:
On 20 August 2014 04:16, meekerdb <[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.
The algae are universal entities, or colonies of universal entities
(cells, who have self-referential correctness feature, with respect to
the chemical law they obey).
The thermostat is not Turing universal, it is only a word made by
another universal being (the quantum laws, if you want).
The algae are much more complex evolutionary systems, and it might be
conscious at a different scale. I just mean that I can't prove the
contrary, so I am open to it, without trying to much to defend the
idea (I use 61% to say that, I would not call that a good chance, just
above the halve). How can I judge without some personal contact with
the Algae.
It seems I made clear that for consciousness you need Turing
universality. You need a brain, a computer, a universal number, or
some DNA in some cell.
If a thermostat is conscious, so is a knife. Does a knife survive when
you change the knife handle, and then the knife blade?
Bruno
Bruno
Bruno
Brent
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