Re: 3 possible views of "consciousness" +

From: <hpm.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2001 19:58:27 EST

George Levy <GLevy.domain.name.hidden>:

> The Humongous Table is just consciousness by proxy. I have nothing
> against tables, mind you :-) . Let's not forget that this table (or
> the interpreter that converts this table into meaning) did not occur
> by accident. Either someone programmed it or it evolved to be what
> it is.

I absolutely disagree, and don't believe your term "conscious by
proxy" has any meaning.

An entity is conscious by virtue of being a construct of
psychological beliefs and feelings, with specific beliefs and
feelings about its own experiences, and soley and completely for
that reason.

An implementation of the entity is just a mapping from those
psychological states to states of a mechanism. But the entity's
internal psychologic is unaffected by the details of any such mapping,
whether its states are encoded this way or that way, compactly or
distributedly, transitions happen slowly or quickly or out of order.
A Table or a Book or a Clock or whatever, what does the entity care?
Its awareness is in the psychological variables that are being mapped,
not the mechanism they're being mapped onto.

The encoding only matters when two encoded entities want to
communicate. Then their psychological states must be communicated
through a common encoding. We manage that with each other through the
rigamarole of brains and bodies and sense and effector organs (and
imagine achieving that with AIs using Turing test passing programs).
But even then only the interaction matters. The internal encoding of
the psychological states makes no difference to the consciousness of
the entities, it only affects the complexity of the translation
mechanism needed for communication.


> There are many kinds of consciousness.

Sure, but they differ in how their psychological construction
is organized: their beliefs, feelings, plans, etc., not
how those abstractions are encoded onto physical substrates.


> The conventional approach of regarding consciousness as discrete and
> well separated entities obviously does not work.

Works for me. It's arbitrary, but handy.
Received on Sun Feb 04 2001 - 17:03:55 PST