On 8/24/2014 12:55 AM, Russell Standish wrote:
On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 09:51:27PM -0700, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/22/2014 11:42 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 09:16:27AM -0700, meekerdb 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.
Just out of curiosity, where do you think my operational definition of
consciousness being a member of the reference class of anthropic reasoning fits
into your quadripartite classification?
Is being a dog a valid state for the anthropic reference class? Being
a koi? All I know is that most animals are not valid members of the
reference class. Hence my "ants are not conscious" paper.
ISTM that anyone applying the anthropic principle gets to choose any
reference class they are member of. I read your paper and you
conclude ants can't be conscious because then, as a member of the
conscious beings, I'd most likely be and ant - but I'm not. But why
doesn't it work as well for other properties? Ants aren't DNA based
because if they were, I, as a DNA based being, would most likely be
an ant - but I'm not an ant.
I don't think that can be the case. I don't see how it can be anything
to be like a tree, yet trees are clearly DNA-based beings. So you
would get skewed results if you were to reason as though you could be
a tree.
Exactly. It's a reductio on the pattern of argument you used to prove ants can't be
conscious. I used it to prove ants can't be DNA based.
The reference class cannot be larger than the class of conscious
beings. Obviously it can be quite a bit smaller, but there must be a
maximal reference class for which anthropic reasoning is valid,
although it is quite controversial what it is - some suggest it may
even be as small as those people capable of understanding the
anthropic argument, a sizable fraction of which inhabits this list!
That's what bothers me. If you exclude ants because they're not conscious (and I assume
you've read "Godel, Escher, and Bach") and hence can't understand the argument, why not
exclude people who can't understand the argument?
But that smacks of parochialism, much like the notion of
geocentrism. I just haven't found a convincing argument that the
maximal reference class is not just the class of conscious organisms,
of beings for whom there is a something it is like to be.
But my question (which you haven't answered) is what you think this
maximal reference class is from your four part classification of consciousness.
If I had to pick, I'd say it was those entities who were aware of their own thoughts and
had sufficient language to formulate Bayesian inference.
Brent
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