On 07 Mar 2015, at 23:33, meekerdb 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. 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).
It is consistent with the machine's theory of consciousness, where
being conscious is a bet on <>t, which can lead to a self-speed-up,
and gives a role to consciousness, even a quite important one a
posteriori.
Self-acceleration can probably be related to economizing resources, I
guess.
It is also close to the old theory of perception by Helmholtz, where a
perception is an automated inductive inference.
Bruno
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]>
To: EveryThing <[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
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