On 22 Aug 2014, at 18:49, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/22/2014 2:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 21 Aug 2014, at 19:40, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/21/2014 1:03 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 21 Aug 2014, at 01:45, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/20/2014 2:20 PM, John Mikes wrote:
Brent: why should "spiders" (etc.) be 'not conscious'?
I think they are, in a way. But if I were pitching the idea of
uploading someone's mother into a virtual reality and warranting
that said virtual mother would be conscious, I don't think I'd
mention that the concept of "conscious" was elastic enough to
include spiders.
BTW what is your take on "conscious"? I have no idea myself,
because I consider "everything" an 'observer' that tackles info
about anything - and
the brainfunction(?) invoked by many for conscious processes
lacks the connection in our present scintific catasters
(measurements?) to topical contents (distinctions).
When I have to speak about 'consciousness' I have a different
meaning in mind from 'being conscious' (an elusive term).
Ccness means in my vocabulary the 'response to relations'. A
process.
I tried to distinguish that, which I called "awarness" from
"self-awarness". Maybe I should lay out my idea of these levels
of consciousness, not claiming they have some metaphysical
significance, just terminology:
awareness: JM's response to relations. This is very low level,
like my thermostat is aware of the temperature because it has a
specific response to it in service of a goal.
self-awareness: Having an interior mental model in which self is
represented alongside other 3p elements of the model, i.e. my
koi know where they are in the pond.
consciousness: Creating a narrative account of events for memory
and calling up those memories in developing "responses to
relations".
self-consciousness: Reflective awareness of consciousness, i.e.
attributing thought and intention to the 3p model of one's self.
Dunno if those are useful, but they seem to me to be a kind of
hierarchy of consciousness that is more descriptive and finer
than Bruno's "any universal Turing machine".
Are you kidding me or what?
We have the raw consciousness for *all* universal machine, yes,
then we nhave self-consciousness for the Löbian
machines, which are much more than universal machine, then we
have the 8 internal views, and all the
refinement between belief, knowledge, observation, feeling, all
being themselves nuanced by the G and G* separation, and all this
in a testable (and tested ) way, thanks to the observation part.
But, as I understand it, those computational based categories make
no distinction between the jumping spider (what do you have
against web spiders?) the dog and me in terms of consciousness.
Yes.
(there are no evidences that web spiders induce a world independent
of them. There are such evidence for the jumping spider, which
arise probably for their complex hunting technic. They have a
bigger brain, also, and display more competence and changes of
competence according to different situations.
We all have feelings, knoweldge, make observations. But I think
there are other qualitative differences as I said above.
That difference is taking into account in the machine rational
"believability", symbolized by the modal "box", and which is
representable in the brain in a 3p way, unlike the []p & p, which
cannot be represented, but will also admit qualitative difference,
according to the "memories" contained in the "[]" part. I agree,
consciousness admits infinities of qualitative differences.
So a conscious being may lack some qualities that another has.
Sure. I know a guy who survived a car crash, but lost completely the
sense of taste and smell.
Blind people, at birth, are not unconscious.
Which is what I meant by consciousness is not all-or-nothing.
That is what I said, that I did not mean it in that way, and I can
even conceive "conscious state" which looks, when we come back from
them, like if the "conscious intensity" was low. But consciousness
itself is all of nothing. The image is like a real number can be great
or little (that's relative), but it is positive or null (in the
classical analysis). It cannot be half positive half null, or in a
metaphorical sense only.
Now, that "intensity" is still a brain/number construct, part of a
full invariant conscious background. Some drugs, like alcohol up to
the nausea, can trigger quite unpleasing abnormal consciousness
intensity level, perhaps related to liver problem.
Now, is the normal consciousness of a butterfly less intense than
human's one. Less rich? That is not clear for me. Self-consciousness
adds a lot, but I am not sure it adds "intensity". I use quotes, as it
is a very vague notion, which can be different in the experience and
in a recollection of the experience.
Bruno
Brent
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