On 28 May 2015, at 20:12, Terren Suydam wrote:
On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:20 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
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.
Right. My point is not that we aren't conscious in non-lucid dream
states, but that there is a qualitative difference in consciousness
between those two states, and that lucid-dream consciousness is much
closer to waking consciousness than to dream consciousness, almost
by definition. It's this fact I'm trying to explain by proposing the
role of the ego in human consciousness.
OK. usually I make that difference between simple universality
(conscious, but not necessarily self-conscious), and Löbianity (self-
conscious). It is the difference between Robinson Arithmetic and Peano
Arithmetic (= RA + the induction axioms).
It is an open problem for me if RA is more or less conscious than PA.
PA has much stronger cognitive abilities, but this can filter more
consciousness and leads to more delusion, notably that "ego".
I don't insist too much on this, as I am not yet quite sure. It leads
to the idea that brains filter consciousness, by hallucinating the
person.
I make this remark because most of the time I use "consciousness" in
its rough general sense, in which animals, dreamers, ... are
conscious.
Of course... my points are about what kinds of aspects of being
human might privilege our consciousness, in an attempt to understand
consciousness better.
OK. I understand.
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".
Right, one could argue that even insects have some kind of self-
model. There is no doubt a spectrum of sophistication of self-
models, but I would distinguish all of them from the human ego. I
guess I was too quick before when I equated the two. The key
distinction between a self-model and an ego is the ability to refer
to oneself as an object - this, and the ability to identify with
that object, reifies the self model in a way that appears to me to
be crucial to human consciousness. I don't think this is really
possible without language.
Probably. But that identification is already a sort of "illusion". It
is very useful in practice, to survive, when being alive. But the
truth, including possible afterlives is more complex.
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.
For me, the key insight I had in trying to describe the difference
between lucid and non-lucid dreams is the ability to say "I am
dreaming", which is an ego statement. What other explanations could
account for the difference between lucid and non-lucid dreams?
No problem with this. I made this remark only because I know people
who confuse awakeness and consciousness. Some, like Malcolm deny any
consciousness in the sleeping state (nor in any machine).
Note that we can know that we are dreaming, but we can never know "for
sure" that we are awake, and indeed with comp, the QM weirdness can be
interpreted as symptoms that we belong to a collective, first person
sharable, sort of dream.
Bruno
Terren
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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