On 28 May 2015, at 05:16, Terren Suydam wrote:
Language starts to get in the way here, but what you're suggesting
is akin to someone who is blind-drunk - they will have no memory of
their experience, but I think most would say a blind-drunk is
conscious.
But I think the driving scenario is different in that my conscious
attention is elsewhere... there's competition for the resource of
attention. I don't really think I'm conscious of the feeling of the
floor pressing my feet until I pay attention to it.
My thinking on this is that human consciousness involves a unified/
global dynamic, and the unifying thread is the self-model or ego.
This allows for top-down control of attention. When parts of the
sensorium (and other aspects of the mind) are not involved or
included in this global dynamic, there is a significant sense in
which it does not participate in that human consciousness. This is
not to say that there is no other consciousness - just that it is
perhaps of a lower form in a hierarchy of consciousness.
I would highlight that human consciousness is somewhat unique in
that the ego - a cultural innovation dependent on the development of
language - is not present in animals. Without that unifying thread
of ego, I suggest that animal consciousness is not unlike our dream
consciousness, which is an arena of awareness when the thread of our
ego dissolves. A visual I have is that in the waking state, the ego
is a bag that encapsulates all the parts that make up our psyche. In
dreamtime, the drawstring on the bag loosens and the parts float
out, and get activated according to whatever seemingly random
processes that constitute dreams.
In lucid dreams, the ego is restored (i.e. we say to ourselves, "I
am dreaming") - and we "regain" consciousness.
We regain the ego (perhaps the ego illusion), but as you say yourself
above, we are conscious in the non-lucid dream too. Lucidity might be
a relative notion, as we can never be sure to be awaken. The false-
awakening, very frequent for people trained in lucid dreaming,
illustrate somehow this phenomena.
I make this remark because most of the time I use "consciousness" in
its rough general sense, in which animals, dreamers, ... are conscious.
Then, I am not sure higher mammals have not yet already some ego, and
self-consciousness, well before language. Language just put the ego in
evidence, and that allows further reflexive loops, which can lead to
further illusions and "soul falling situation".
Nor am I sure that our ego dissolves in non-lucid dream, although it
seems to disappear in the non-REM dreams, and other sleep states.
Bruno
Terren
On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 10:10 PM, Jason Resch <[email protected]>
wrote:
Are we any less conscious of as it happens, or perhaps our brains
are simply not forming as many memories of usual/uneventful tasks.
Jason
On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 9:06 PM, Terren Suydam <[email protected]
> wrote:
In the driving scenario it is clear that computation is involved,
because all sorts of contingent things can be going on (e.g.
dynamics of driving among other cars), yet this occurs without
crossing the threshold of consciousness. Relying on some kind of
caching mechanism under such circumstances would quickly fail one
way or another.
Terren
On May 27, 2015 7:38 PM, "Pierz" <[email protected]> wrote:
On Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 6:06:22 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote:
On 5/26/2015 10:31 PM, Pierz wrote:
Where I see lookup tables fail is that they seem to operate above
the probable necessary substation level. (Despite having the same
inputs/outputs at the higher levels).
But your memoization example still makes a good point - namely that
some computations can be bypassed in favour of recordings, yet
presumably this doesn't lead to fading qualia. We don't need
anything as silly as a gigantic lookup table of all possible
responses. We only need to acknowledge that we can store the
results of recordings of computations we've already completed, and
that this should not result in any strange degradation of
consciousness.
Isn't that what allows me to drive home from work without being
conscious of it?
People keep making this point, which is one that I myself made in
the past - and I believe you argued with me at the time, saying that
it's not clear that the mechanism for automating brain functions is
anything like the same as caching the results of a computation. I
think that objection is actually fair enough. With automated actions
it's not clear that the computations aren't being carried out any
more, just that they no longer require conscious attention because
the neuronal pathways for those computations have become
sufficiently reinforced that they no longer require concentration. I
think this model (automated computation rather than cached
computation) fits our experience of this phenomenon. Sometimes I
suspect we're really talking out of our proverbial arses with these
speculations as we still have so little idea about how the brain
works. It may be a computer in the sense that it is Turing emulable,
but then we talk as if it were squishy laptop or something, and that
analogy can be misleading in many ways. For example, our memories
are nothing like RAM. They are distributed like a hologram,
constructive and fuzzy, whereas computer memory is localised,
passive and accurate to the bit. I'm probably guilty of the same
over-zealous computationalism with my lookup table analogy above,
but I was thinking more of an AI and the in-principle point that
cached computation results may be employed at a fine grained level.
I would continue to insist that it is meaningless to say that a
"brain" that employs cached results of computations is a zombie to
the extent that it does so, because it is meaningless to speak of
the "when" of qualia. (You never replied to my argument about poking
a recorded Einstein with a stick, which I think makes a compelling
case for this.) We have to rigorously divide the subjective and the
objective.
Brent
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