On 11/28/2014 7:31 PM, Kim Jones wrote:
On 29 Nov 2014, at 1:37 pm, LizR <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Brent
I seem to remember saying that I thought perhaps consciousness is something like
"awareness of yourself and your environment" and asking if you had a better
definition a couple of days ago. Did you reply? I don't recall seeing anything.
If not - any ideas?
Consciousness is what makes qualia possible. There are no qualia without consciousness. Producing qualia is
what consciousness "does". So consciousness is the "field" in which qualia exist. A quale
is merely an event that I notice. Everything experienced carries a value which goes into my personal lookup
table. I can then quickly recognise stuff the next time it comes along. So already, we can see that the
"purpose" of consciousness is to accelerate awareness via embedded patterns of recogntion: memory.
Intelligence on it's own cannot encode enough information quickly enough to aid survival. It's too slow. an
amoeba has intelligence but the poor bloody things get swallowed by paramecia all the time. They just don't
learn. Consciousness revs the engine at a higher rate so the knowledge bedding-down process happens a whole
lot quicker.
So, I prefer to define what consciousness is by what it does. I don't think
there is one word that covers it.
Kim
So it's recall of things similar to perceived things. That's similar to Jeff Hawkins idea
except he says perceptions enter consciousness when they don't match predictions: your
brain is continuously making predictions and only what's new and unique rises to
consciousness.
Brent
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