[Fwd: Re: Book preview: Theory of Nothing]

From: Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 08:34:55 -0700

David Pearce wrote:
> May I just make some comments on one particular claim in Russell's
> Theory of Nothing:
> "Self-awareness is a necessary feature of consciousness"
> This would be extremely important if true; but there are problems....
>
> 1. Each night we go psychotic in our dreams. Rare lucid dreams aside,
> the reason we don't realise we are only dreaming is precisely because of
> our absence of self-awareness or critical self-insight. The relevant
> module of the brain has effectively shut down. Yet it would be
> misleading to call dreams "non-conscious"? Some dreams e.g. nightmares,
> can be intense and frightening while they last.

This is a good point. I think there are different kinds of consciousness and
maybe even different amounts within a kind. John McCarthy has discussed how you
would make a robot conscious. His idea implies several different kinds or
levels of consciousness, e.g. knowledge of one's location, knowledge of one's
state of health, knowledge of plans, etc.

>
> 2. More seriously, the idea that self-awareness is a necessary feature
> of consciousness has profound implications for the moral status of
> babies, the severely mentally handicapped - and most non-human animals.
> Clearly, they don't have a sophisticated sense of self. Arguably they
> lack all self-awareness. But surely, if they have nociceptors and a
> central nervous system, then they do feel pain - sometimes intensely?

As Bentham said, moral status doesn't depend on whether they can think, but
whether they can suffer. "Moral" status is something we grant to others; it's
essentially a social/political construct. I don't think it can have profound
implications for physics.

>
> Tellingly, perhaps, our most intense experiences - e.g. extreme agony,
> orgasm, blind panic, etc - are marked by an absence of
> self-consciousness.

I agree. I would also add that all excellent atheletic performance is sans
self-consciousness. But also a lot of our most intellectual accomplishments are
unconscious, e.g. the Poincare effect. Consciousness is only a small part of
our thinking and a lot of it is dependent on language.

>Conversely, some of our most sophisticated forms of
> self-awareness have a very subtle phenomenology indeed [e.g examples so
> called "higher-order intentionality" - I think that she hopes that he
> believes that I want...etc etc]

You can string together words in a sentence like this, but before it gets very
long I think you can no longer entertain it as a thought. This points to the
language dependence of a lot of our thought. We can all understand a simple
mathematical proof. But even simple proofs we understand one step at a time,
rather than as a gestalt.

> Generalizing to other creatures with central nervous systems, one may be
> sceptical that whales, say, are very intelligent. They may or may not
> possess rudimentary self-awareness. But it's at least possible that they
> experience pain more intensely than we do - their "pain centers" are
> larger for a start.
> Self-awareness may be intimately linked to intelligence; but it's not
> clear (to me at least) that consciousness /per se/ is linked to
> intelligence at all.

Of course it depends on how you define "intelligence". I think that a certain
high level of flexibility in learning and planning requires consciousness.
Self-awareness is probably needed when this is in a social context (c.f. Julian
Jaynes)

>
> 3. Also, I think it may be premature (re Russell's comment in ToN on
> Susan Greenfield) to say that the notion of levels of consciousness is
> devoid of meaning.
> Yes, there is an absolute "binary" distinction between consciousness and
> non-consciousness.

I'm not even sure of this. Again it will depend on what "consciousness" is. I
think we may find that admits of degrees.

> But this absolute distinction doesn't entail that the idea of degrees of
> consciousness itself is meaningless. Thus pain can be mild, moderate or
> intense. One can be dimly self-aware or acutely self-aware.

And one can be aware of how you compare to your ideals, of what others think of
you, of what you hoped in the past, etc.

>And there
> are even cases of awareness even while under surgical general anesthesia
> - though fortunately they are quite rare.
> [etc]
>
> Apologies if I've misunderstood the argument here.
> Dave
>

Brent Meeker
"One cannot guess the real difficulties of a problem before
having solved it."
    --- Carl Ludwig Siegel
Received on Mon Aug 29 2005 - 11:41:05 PDT