On Sat, Feb 25, 2017 Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> >> Why, where is the mystery? If external information didn't CAUSE your >> consciousness to change you might as well be blind and deaf, and if >> consciousness didn't CAUSE external things to change you might as well be >> paralyzed from the neck down . >> >> > > > > I meant and in the second sense. > I meant physical actions changing consciousness, what is the second meaning? > > > Take an artificial neural network driving a car. Like me, you suspect it > might be conscious > Well... I suspect a artificial neural network driving a car is as conscious as a typical human is who is driving over the same road he has done a thousand times before, and that's not much. Can you remember one specific event you were conscious of when you drove to work last Thursday? > > > but we know the full mechanism. We know it's a bunch of thresholds > connected in a complex way, running on von neumann machine and so on. How > is consciousness causing behavior ? > The problem is not unique to consciousness, how does anything "cause" anything? When we say A causes Z we mean that whenever A happens Z happens. But you could say that is mysterious because A is not Z, and indeed when we look closer we discover that actually A causes B and then B causes Z, but B is not Z either, and when we look even closer we find that B cause C and C causes Z. And so it goes. Either this chain of causality goes on forever, in which case A doesn't cause Z at all and yet we know it does, or eventually we come to a brute fact, Y causes Z and there is no "why" from there. But as I said this difficulty has nothing specifically to do with consciousness, it's just in the nature of causality. If you are conscious and if you are the product of random mutation and natural selection as Darwin said them "intelligence causes consciousness" is a brute fact, but eventually you'll always encounter a brute fact if you look at causal chains close enough, not just ones involving consciousness. John K Clark > > >> John K Clark >> >> >> >> -- >> 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 https://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 https://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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
