On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 11:33 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
> I like Graziano's theory of consciousness. > > http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/how-consciousness-works/ > > I have generally been inclined to agree with JKC that natural selection > can't act on consciousness, only on intelligence; so consciousness is > either a necessary byproduct of intelligence or it's a spandrel. > If you assume materialism. Telmo. > But under Graziano's theory it's a way of augmenting or improving > intelligence within constraints of limited computational resources. So it > would be subject to natural selection. It also shows how to make > intelligence machines without consciousness (albeit less efficient ones). > > Brent > > > On 3/7/2015 5:45 AM, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote: > > Isn't this the Graziano fellow who back in Dec. 2013 write an article in > AEON about uploading? Ah! yes he is. > > > http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/virtual-afterlives-will-transform-humanity/ > > > -----Original Message----- > From: meekerdb <[email protected]> <[email protected]> > To: EveryThing <[email protected]> > <[email protected]> > Sent: Fri, Mar 6, 2015 8:06 pm > Subject: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness > > > > *The attention schema theory satisfies two problems of understanding > consciousness, said Aaron Schurger, a senior researcher of cognitive > neuroscience at the Brain Mind Institute at the École Polytechnique > Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland who received his doctorate from > Princeton in 2009. The "easy" problem relates to correlating brain activity > with the presence and absence of consciousness, he said. The "hard" problem > has been to determine how consciousness comes about in the first place. > Essentially all existing theories of consciousness have addressed only the > easy problem. Graziano shows that the solution to the hard problem might be > that the brain describes some of the information that it is actively > processing as conscious because that is a useful description of its own > process of attention, Schurger said.* > > *"Michael's theory explains the connection between attention and > consciousness in a very elegant and compelling way," Schurger said.* > > *"His theory is the first theory that I know of to take both the easy > and the hard problems head on," he said. "That is a gaping hole in all > other modern theories, and it is deftly plugged by Michael's theory. Even > if you think his theory is wrong, his theory reminds us that any theory > that avoids the hard problem has almost certainly missed the mark, because > a plausible solution — his theory — exists that does not appeal to magic or > mysterious, as-yet-unexplained phenomena."* > > Read the rest: > > > http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S38/91/90C37/index.xml?section=featured > > Brent > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
