Let me please insert my remarks into this remarkable chain of thoughts below
(my inserts in bold)
John M
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 2:03 AM, Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>wrote:
>
> Kelly Harmon wrote:
> > I think your discussing the functional aspects of consciousness. AKA,
> > the "easy problems" of consciousness. The question of how human
> > behavior is produced.
*I believe it is a 'forced artifact' to separate any aspect of a complex
image from the entire 'unit' we like to call 'conscious behavior'. In our
(analytical) view we regard the 'activity' as separate from the initiation
and the process resulting from it through decision(?) AND the assumed
maintaining of the function. *
>
> >
> > My question was what is the source of "phenomenal" consciousness.
> > What is the absolute minimum requirement which must be met in order
> > for conscious experience to exist? So my question isn't HOW human
> > behavior is produced, but instead I'm asking why the mechanistic
> > processes that produce human behavior are accompanied by subjective
> > "first person" conscious experience. The "hard problem". Qualia.
*We are 'human' concentrated and slanted in our views. *
*Extending it not only to other 'conscious' animals, but to phenomena in the
so (mis)called 'inanimate' - and reversing our logical habit (see below to
Brent) brings up different questions so far not much discussed. The 'hard
problem' is a separation in the totality of the phenomenon -*
*[from its physical/physiological observation within our so far
outlined figment of viewing the 'physical world' separately and its
reduced, conventional ('scientific') explanations] - *
* into assuming (some) undisclosed other aspects of the same complex. From
'quantized' into some 'qualia'. *
> >
> > I wasn't asking "how is it that we do the things we do", or, "how did
> > this come about", but instead "given that we do these things, why is
> > there a subjective experience associated with doing them."
*And we should exactly ask what you "wasn't" asking. *
**
>
> Brent: Meeker:
> Do you suppose that something could behave just as humans do yet not be
> conscious, i.e. could there be a philosophical zombie?
*Once we consider the totality of the phenomenon and do not separate aspects
of th complexity, the "zombie" becomes a meaningless artifact of the
primitive ways our thinking evolved. *
>
> Kelly:
> >
> > So none of the things you reference are relevant to the question of
> > whether a computer simulation of a human mind would be conscious in
> > the same way as a real human mind. If a simulation would be, then
> > what are the properties that those to two very dissimilar physical
> > systems have in common that would explain this mutual experience of
> > consciousness?
*A fitting computer simulation would include ALL aspects involved - call it
mind AND body, 'physically' observable 'activity' and 'consciousness as
cause' -- but alas, no such thing so far. Our embryonic machine with its
binary algorithms, driven by a switched on (electrically induced) primitive
mechanism can do just that much, within the known segments designed 'in'. *
*What we may call 'qualia' is waiting for some analogue comp, working
simultaneously on all aspects of the phenomena involved (IMO not practical,
since there cannot be a limit drawn in the interrelated totality, beyond
which relations may be irrelevant). *
**
>
> Brent:
> The information processing?
*Does that mean a homunculus, that 'processes' the (again separated) aspect
of 'information' into a format that fits our image of the aspectwise
formulated items? *
*What I question is the 'initiation' and 'maintenance' of what we call the
occurrence of phenomena. We do imagine a 'functioning' world where
everything just does occur, observed by itself and in no connection to the
rest of the world. *
*I am looking for 'relations' that 'influence' each other into aspects we
consider as 'different' (from what?) and call such relational
interconnectedness the world. *
*We are far from knowing it all, even further from any 'true' understanding
so we fabricted in our epistemic enrichment over the millennia a stepwise
approach to 'explain' the miracles. *
*Learning of acknowledged(?) relational aspects (call it decisionmaking?)
and realization of ramifications upon such (call it process, function,
activity) is the basis of our (now still reductionistic) physical
worldview. *
*Please excuse my hasty writing in premature ideas I could not detail out or
even justify using inadequate old words that should be relaced by a fitting
vocabulry. ((Alberto (below) even mentions 'memory' - that could as well be
a re-visiting of relations in the a-temporal totality view we coordinate as
a time - space physics)). *
>
>
> Brent
>
*John M*
> >
> > On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 3:22 AM, Alberto G.Corona <agocorona.domain.name.hidden>
> wrote:
> >> No. Consciousness is not information. It is an additional process that
> >> handles its own generated information. I you donīt recognize the
> >> driving mechanism towards order in the universe, you will be running
> >> on empty. This driving mechanism is natural selection. Things gets
> >> selected, replicated and selected again.
> >>
> >> In the case of humans, time ago the evolutionary psychologists and
> >> philosophers (Dennet etc) discovered the evolutionary nature of
> >> consciousness, that is double: For social animals, consciousness keeps
> >> an actualized image of how the others see ourselves. This ability is
> >> very important in order to plan future actions with/towards others
> >> members. A memory of past actions, favors and offenses are kept in
> >> memory for consciousness processing. This is a part of our moral
> >> sense, that is, our navigation device in the social environment.
> >> Additionally, by reflection on ourselves, the consciousness module can
> >> discover the motivations of others.
> >>
> >> The evolutionary steps for the emergence of consciousness are: 1) in
> >> order to optimize the outcome of collaboration, a social animal start
> >> to look the others as unique individuals, and memorize their own
> >> record of actions. 2) Because the others do 1, the animal develop a
> >> sense of itself and record how each one of the others see himself
> >> (this is adaptive because 1). 3) This primitive conscious module
> >> evolved in 02 starts to inspect first and lately, even take control of
> >> some action with a deep social load. 4) The conscious module
> >> attributes to an individual moral self every action triggered by the
> >> brain, even if it driven by low instincts, just because thatīs is the
> >> way the others see himself as individual. Thatīs why we feel ourselves
> >> as unique individuals and with an indivisible Cartesian mind.
> >>
> >> The consciousness ability is fairly recent in evolutionary terms. This
> >> explain its inefficient and sequential nature. This and 03 explains why
> >> we feel anxiety in some social situations: the cognitive load is too
> >> much for the conscious module when he tries to take control of the
> >> situation when self image it at a stake. This also explain why when we
> >> travel we feel a kind of liberation: because the conscious module is
> >> made irrelevant outside our social circle, so our more efficient lower
> >> level modules take care of our actions
> >>
>
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Received on Sun May 17 2009 - 08:07:43 PDT