Brent Meeker writes (quoting SP):
> >>Consider a computer which is doing something (whether it is dreaming or
> >>musing or just running is the point in question). If there is no
> >>interaction between what it's running and the rest of the world I'd say
> >>it's not conscious. It doesn't necessarily need an external observer
> >>though. To invoke an external observer would require that we already
> >>knew how to distinguish an observer from a non-observer. This just
> >>pushes the problem away a step. One could as well claim that the walls
> >>of the room which are struck by the photons from the screen constitute
> >>an observer - under a suitable mapping of wall states. The computer
> >>could, like a Mars rover, act directly on the rest of the world.
> >
> >
> > The idea that we can only be conscious when interacting with the environment
> > is certainly worth considering. After all, consciousness evolved in order to help
> > the organism deal with its environment, and it may be wrong to just assume
> > without further evidence that consciousness continues if all interaction with the
> > environment ceases. Maybe even those activities which at first glance seem to
> > involve consciousness in the absence of environmental interaction actually rely
> > on a trickle of sensory input: for example, maybe dreaming is dependent on
> > proprioceptive feedback from eye movements, which is why we only dream
> > during REM sleep, and maybe general anaesthetics actually work by eliminating
> > all sensory input rather than by a direct effect on the cortex. But even if all this
> > is true, we could still imagine stimulating a brain which has all its sensory inputs
> > removed so that the pattern of neural activity is exactly the same as it would
> > have been had it arisen in the usual way. Would you say that the artificially
> > stimulated brain is not conscious, even though everything up to and including
> > the peripheral nerves is physically identical to and goes through the same
> > physical processes as the normal brain?
>
> No. I already noted that we can't insist that interaction with the
> environment is continuous. Maybe "potential interaction" would be
> appropriate. But I note that even in your example you contemplate
> "stimulating" the brain. I'm just trying to take what I consider an
> operational defintion and abstract it to the kind of
> mathematical/philosophical definition that can be applied to questions
> about rocks thinking.
The brain-with-wires-attached cannot interact with the environment, because
all its sense organs have been removed and the stimulation is just coming from
a recording. Instead of the wires + recording we could say that there is a special
group of neurons with spontaneous activity that stimulates the rest of the brain
just as if it were receiving input from the environment. Such a brain would have
no ability to interact with the environment, unless the effort were made to
figure out its internal code and then manufacture sense organs for it - but I
think that would be stretching the definition of "potential interaction". In any
case, I don't see how "potential interaction" could make a difference. If you had
two brains sitting in the dark, identical in anatomy and electrical activity except
that one has its optic nerves cut, will one brain be conscious and the other not?
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Thu Aug 03 2006 - 01:23:41 PDT