On 4/26/2017 4:39 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Give us the meat of your arguments and I promise to read with an open mind. In my case, I am mostly interested in the first principles that allow you to claim that consciousness emerges from complex interactions between physical entities.
I think this question is best approached by constructing a robot that behaves like an intelligent person and then looking at what functions in the robot might correspond to conscious and unconscious thought. For example, an important aspect of intelligence is learning. Learning requires remembering events and recognizing similarity and difference of new and old events. Humans seem to create narratives about events which are essentially compressed notes (in images as well as words) about the event. If these have significance they are remembered as a basis for learning - if they are commonplace they are forgotten (what did you have for lunch last Thursday?). Commonplace essentially means predictable based on what has already been learned/remembered. So the brain functions by continually predicting sensory events. So long as this is accurate, the event is forgotten. When it is surprising then it's compressed version is remembered. In this description of (part of) human thought the continual prediction and comparison of sensory events is what we call awareness. The compression into narrative and the recall of narrative notation in words and images is consciousness.
I think these functions, memorization, prediction, recall, are essential to intelligence. But I don't think they have to be done as brains do them. For example an electronic device can be much faster than a brain, so it might not be necessary to compress events into narrative notes. It might be possible to make an intelligence being that simply recorded ALL sensory input. This is what NASA is, regarded as a super-being, when it conducts an experiment like a Jupiter flyby. They continuously record everything so they can evaluate it later. Such an entity would be conscious, but in a slightly different way.
My $0.02. Brent -- 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.
