On 3/8/2015 7:33 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 11:52 PM, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:>> He [Graziano]says consciousness is just another name for attention, but computers have been paying attention to some things and not others form almost as long as they've existed. For example the LHC produces nearly a billion particle collisions per second and each collision produces about one megabyte of data, so you'd need 200,000 DVDs each second the LHC is in operation to store that much information, and it's designed to be in operation 20 hours a day 300 days a year. Even a computer can't remember all that, Instead the computers looks at each collision and quickly decides if there is anything that *might* be worthy of its attention and remembers only them. So out of the billion collisions each second the computer only remembers and pays attention to what happened in about 200 collisions, all the other data is just thrown away. Even so that's still a HUGE amount of information to store. There is always the possibility you're throwing away something important but there is no alternative, you just can't keep it all. > As I understand it the proper analogy would not be selecting which collisions to analyze in real time, it would be a level up from that: managing the allocation computer resources (most of which are off the LHC site) to the selection process.I don't understand your distinction. The LHC just can't record a billion collisions a second, it can only remember about 200 and even that takes a herculean effort, so it uses a fast but very well crafted algorithm to pick out the 200 out of that billion that seem most interesting to it and pays attention only to them. Likewise when you spot a Saber Toothed Tiger you pay attention only to the sense data that is related to the tiger, so even though it's within your field of view you ignore the fact that your shoes don't seem to be polished. And it's the same with internal signals, you stop thinking about Plato's philosophy and stop reminiscing about the birthday party you had when you were ten the instant you spot the tiger and devote the entire computational resources of your brain to matters that you judge to be of more immediate concern.
But, as I understand Graziano, consciousness consists in having another higher level model that can record that you're now paying attention to the tiger. So afterward you can report,"And that's when I noticed the tiger and..."
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