Consciousness - a flow of related thoughts in time - does not exist, any
more than time itself exists. All that exists of 'you' is this very present
thought.
This simple view solves all known paradoxes of consciousness, fits with what
we know of the world, and is, incidentally, in concord with Buddhist
philosophy. You can even be happy if you believe it; believing it forces you
to live in the present.
James
----- Original Message -----
From: <hal.domain.name.hidden>
To: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Monday, January 15, 2001 7:14 PM
Subject: Is consciousness real?
> It seems that one of the implicit assumptions in the all-universe model
> is that consciousness is real and that we can determine whether whether
> consciousness would exist in a particular universe. This allows us to
> apply the anthropic principle and argue that the most probable universes
> which allow consciousness to exist are the ones we should observe.
>
> An essay at the Edge site by Stanislas Dehaene challenges the
> meaningfulness of "consciousness" as a descriptive term, comparing it to
> "life" as something which turns out not to be well defined. How would
> this affect the use of the anthropic principle in attempting to draw
> predictions from the AUH?
>
> The essay, available at
http://www.edge.org/documents/questions/q2001.2.html#dehaene,
> follows below.
>
> Hal
>
> ===
>
> "The definition of life and consciousness?"
>
> Some scientific questions cannot be resolved, but rather are dissolved,
> and vanish once we begin to better understand their terms.
>
> This is often the case for "definitional questions". For instance,
> what is the definition of life? Can we trace a sharp boundary between
> what is living and what is not living? Is a virus living? Is the
> entire earth a living organism? It seems that our brain predisposes
> us to ask questions that require a yes or no answer. Moreover,
> as scientists, we'd like to keep our mental categories straight
> and, therefore, we would like to have neat and tidy definitions of
> the terms we use. However, especially in the biological sciences,
> the objects of reality do not conform nicely to our categorical
> expectations. As we delve into research, we begin to realize that
> what we naively conceived of as a essential category is, in fact, a
> cluster of loosely bound properties that each need to be considered
> in turn (in the case of life: metabolism, reproduction, autonomy,
> homeostasy, etc..). Thus, what was initially considered as a simple
> question, requiring a straightforward answer, becomes a complex issue
> or even a whole domain of research. We begin to realize that there
> is no single answer, but many different answers depending on how one
> frames the terms of the question. And eventually, the question is
> simply dropped. It is not longer relevant.
>
> I strongly suspect that one of today's hottest scientific questions,
> the definition of consciousness, is of this kind. Some scientists seem
> to believe that what we call consciousness is an essence of reality,
> a single coherent phenomenon that can be reduced to a single level
> such as a quantum property of microtubules. Another possibility,
> however, that consciousness is a cluster of properties that, most
> of the time, cohere together in awake adult humans. A minimal list
> probably includes the ability to attend to sensory inputs or internal
> thoughts, to make them available broadly to multiple cerebral systems,
> to store them in working memory and in episodic memory, to manipulate
> them mentally, to act intentionally based on them, and in particular to
> report them verbally. As we explore the issue empirically, we begin
> to find many situations (such as visual masking or specific brain
> lesions) in which those properties break down. The neat question
> "what is consciousness" dissolves into a myriad of more precise and
> more fruitful research avenues.
>
> Any biological theory of consciousness, which assumes that
> consciousness has evolved, implies that "having consciousness" is not
> an all-or-none property. The biological substrates of consciousness
> in human adults are probably also present, but only in partial form,
> in other species, in young children or brain-lesioned patients. It is
> therefore a partially arbitrary question whether we want to extend
> the use of the term "consciousness" to them. For instance, several
> mammals, and even very young human children, show intentional behavior,
> partially reportable mental states, some working memory ability - but
> perhaps no theory of mind, and more "encapsulated" mental processes
> that cannot be reported verbally or even non-verbally. Do they have
> consciousness, then? My bet is that once a detailed cognitive and
> neural theory of the various aspects of consciousness is available,
> the vacuity of this question will become obvious.
>
> STANISLAS DEHAENE, researcher at the Institut National de la Santé,
> studies cognitive neuropsychology of language and number processing
> in the human brain; author of The Number Sense: How Mathematical
> Knowledge Is Embedded In Our Brains.
>
>
Received on Wed Jan 17 2001 - 12:12:33 PST