Well it’s like I said - in the big Windows of the mind there’s a small process running that has been programmed to check out what other processes do. The memories / new neural pathways that this process creates by interacting with other processes among others form the concept of I versus you, something which builds up slowly over the course of a child’s life. Somewhere between age 6-9 this comes to a point where a human being starts being self aware on a level that you and I now experience.
It is not a coincidence that your consciousness can’t really multitask very well, but your brain absolutely can multitask and quite well at that. I’m calling it a process but perhaps it’s more appropriate to call it a neural net that can monitor and organise neural net activity.
Assuming you take the position that grass and rocks aren’t aware or conscious at all, but there might well be things you don’t know about bee cognition, in which memories are access and processed in ways beyond the reach of Cray supercomputers.
I agree entirely: that’s why I don’t ascribe awareness to dead humans - the senses and memory access aren’t working.
The nature and mechanisms of morality, yes. But the ultimate result of our separate deliberations on morality, our conclusions of how to live our lives, are surprisingly similar. That, however, is very definitely for another thread.
I’m afraid that that particular sequence of symbols is not associated with any of my memories, nor indeed any electronic memory searched by Google. Have you considered a duet with Darth Vader playing the watering can?
A photograph has a physical existence, agreed? If not, how can I rip it up and eat it?
I think you mean panpsychism, which is in many ways the antithesis of physicalism.
That’s why I say awareness starts at insects (or, perhaps, complex computer control systems which sense their environment in some way), because there either are no permanent changes reflecting past physical events, or they are not accessible for comparison or processing.
Note that, just as we are debating thresholds regarding what is or is not “aware”, there are just as many debates about what is or is not “life”, with viruses being exactly at that threshold such that reasonable people disagree whether they are really “life” or not. Like I’ve said to other-wise, we can take heart that this subject is in amny ways similar to other eminently scientific subjects, in which experts and layman alike are bound to disagree on details.
The flash cards would go by. You just wouldn’t recognize them. Bear with me as I explain. My expository skills are not the best. But I’ll try to anticipate some of the objections or questions you might have based on our exchanges. So please be mindful that if you see a sentence or phrase that raises a flag, it might be that the next few sentences address it.
Awareness then, based on what we’ve deduced, is the state of having in your cognitive brain a representation of something that is familiar to you. (Cognition, not in the sense of “a mental process of knowing”, but in the sense of “that which comes to be known, as through perception, reasoning, or intuition” — American Heritage.) That representation is presented to you by your brain in the form of immediate memory. Awareness is born of familiarity. Recall from the truck example that, while you were oblivious to the approaching truck, your brain was busy preparing for you something that would be meaningful to you. (Yes, I understand that that means that one part of the brain is preparing something for some other part of the brain, but that is neither here nor there for this purpose; rather, it is a separate matter of consciousness, and what part of your brain is essentially you.) It wasn’t until your brain presented to you an image of the truck (and by the way, I am using “image” not necessarily in the sense of a picture, or rather, just a picture, but in the sense of a “vivid description or representation” — American Heritage) that you became aware. The image was already pre-processed as something you could comprehend. And it all happened in a split second.
Does that mean that, when you encounter something incomprehensible or unfamiliar, you are not aware of it? Well, yes, BUT… As you yourself have said, it is a matter of what you are aware OF. Suppose, for example, that you open, for the first time, a book in Arabic. Your eyes see the page, the brain processes the event, and presents you an immediate memory. All that you are aware of, and all that you can possibly be aware of, is that there is a page before you of squiggles. There are certain things about it that are familiar to you: it is a book, it is Arabic (assuming you’ve been thus assured), it represents something meaningful although you don’t know what, and it is understood by quite many people around the world (but not by you). The more familiar Arabic is to you, the more you are aware of what is in front of you. You might remember, for example, that the squiggles are written right to left rather than left to right, if that is something you’ve been made aware of in the past. Whatever it is that you know or don’t know (or more precisely remember or don’t remember) is all that the brain had to work with when it fetched for you its processed image of the book. As I said just before, the brain might present you with more than just a mental picture of the book. It might also present you with such things as frustration, if you have memories of being frustrated by things you don’t understand. Or dread, if you have memories of dreading foreign languages. Or delight, if you have always enjoyed linguistics. Or some other range of emotions based on prior experiences with similar things. Recall that what the brain has done is dug up everything it can that it discerns has some resemblance or relevance to the event image that it is holding in its holding place — an event image that you are not yet aware of. (You become aware of the processed image. The image in the holding place is discarded.) All these things — the picture itself and the accompanying emotions and prejudices — are part of the image that is presented to you as immediate memory.
Do not make the mistake of attaching awareness to knowledge, or of examining it epistemically. You can easily be aware of false information or beliefs not based in reality. Clothahump mentioned a phenomenon that is surprisingly common. A person might believe he has seen a blue car rather than the car he actually saw. During its processing stage, the brain held in its holding area a representation of the actual car, but for whatever reason did not present you with an image of the car as blue for your awareness. Why? Well, any number of reasons, but mainly because it must do what it does quickly enough that you have time to react. There might not be time for the brain to process such details as the car color, or the logo on the sign in the background, or whether the nearby skateboarder was wearing a shirt. Once it has determined that certain particulars of the image mean danger, its priority becomes making you aware as soon as possible with only as much information as is necessary for you to recognize (or more precisely, be familiar with) the event. That’s quite a different process from, say, standing in a museum and looking at a car. You will likely become aware of every manner of detail as you examine it. But when the event is an impending accident, awareness is limited by the constraints of time and priority. Awareness would be an evolutionary disadvantage if it were too sluggish in arising.
Thus, awareness is not extraneous at all, but rather is an integral and vital part of the process by which you do all those things that you are capable of doing, such as storing short term and long term memories, drawing inferences, developing likes and dislikes, learning, growing intellectually and emotionally, acquiring fears, conquering fears, calling upon experience, recognizing patterns, and making decisions. Without awareness, none of these would be possible.
So now, given a coherent definition of awareness, we can examine entities besides ourselves and determine whether they are aware — like amoebas, or like Sentient’s cadaver. We can also examine ourselves for times when we are functioning but not aware, or are aware but not functioning. (Consider, for example, psychological sexual impotency, wherein a person is so distracted by the minutiae of the process that he is not experiencing stimulation. The fact is that he is not aware of being stimulated because the brain is busy presenting him immediate memories of frustration and impotence — things with which he is familiar with respect to sex.)
We have determined that immediate memory can be drawn from the senses, and when that happens, it does bear strong resemblance to Sentient’s sensory memory, but recall that we also determined that immediate memory can arise spontaneously, without sensory input, in the form of sudden inspiration or enlightenment — sort of the Eureka! factor. It follows then, that even recalling past memories, whether short term or long term, calls upon the process of immediate memory formation in order to make us aware of them. In other words, recalling a memory works in exactly the same way as noticing an oncoming truck or gazing at a Rolls-Royce in a museum. The brain puts the memory in its holding place, just as it would an event image and processes it in the same way, attaching to it whatever new memories and dispatching whatever emotion chemicals it determines are appropriate. Thus, you might recall Donna from college, and your heart will beat faster. If you’ve been out of college for some time, you might even be given an immediate image that is influenced by other experiences you’ve had with other women. The implication from this is rather astonishing. Deductively, it means that you never have the same memory twice. Each time you recall it, it is distorted by newer, intervening memories. And after you’ve become aware of it, and tell the brain to store it, what is stored is the new immediate image and not the one that was in the holding place. That one has now been discarded. That explains how it happens that when you’ve seen Donna after twenty years, there is a lot more different about her from what you remember than just her age.
I’ve done my best to explain all this, and I hope I haven’t ended up just making it more muddled than ever. You are a very patient man, and I do appreciate that.
I believe that pinning down exactly what memory is and what place it occupies in the process of becoming aware may be reasonably said to be a prerequisite to determing whether it is physical or not. If you believe that your discussions about surrealist artists and metaphysical musical instruments is more pertinent than my discussions about awareness and immediate memory, that is your privilege. If not, you really should exercise the self-control to refrain from singling me out and embarassing me with suggestions that I might be somehow off-base or hijacking the thread. Due to past events, that is a matter about which I am extremely sensitive. There is a very simple solution available to you if you find my contributions to be uninteresting or distracting — and much less burdensome than taking upon yourself the task of policing the thread on behalf of Sentient. Just don’t read what I write.
It could also suggest that in fact things that we thought were infinitely complex are in fact a lot more within the reach of a Cray supercomputer than we thought.
My point exactly.
However, that doesn’t change anything at all. On the contrary. The bee is a more complex mechanism than a sheet of grass, but the very specific way in which I’ve defined awareness (linked to the concept of self) is far beyond the reach of a bee. A bee doesn’t think, it computes. What we call thinking is our self-awareness routine computing our other routines and computations, inscribed in our neural pathways with sensation and memory as input variables and action (inside the brain and/or outside the brain) as output variables.
Sure, Arwin, I understand that your personal “thinking entity” threshold lies further along the evolutionary timeline than mine: that’s really a more ‘technical’ issue than a discussion of the nature of memory in the first place (and I’m happy for those kinds of discussions to take place here also).
If I may ask, what would your personal guess be regarding when this “self-awareness routine” appeared: fish, reptiles, mammals, monkeys, Australopithcus?
Well yes and no, I suppose, in the sense that you’ve been tying memory, sensory perception and awareness together in a way that I couldn’t fully agree with (but we do agree on many of the basics)
Hard to tell. One part of me says that this has only developed in humans, partly culturally, but monkey’s can’t be far off. It’s still something that is scaleable, in that you can be more or less aware, depending on how extensively the ‘awareness’ routine has developed itself. So I’m not at all sure … recognising yourself in the mirror seems is a test that comes close to this, but isn’t the end-and-all because for some animals smell is the primary identification. It would be interesting to think what kinds of tests we could devise reliable tests that would prove self-awareness in animals.
A concept of self is something that comes from a large part from social interaction. I’ll have to think about this a bit more when I have time again, possibly after the weekend.
You are correct and I apologize. It is not my place to moderate. I also apologize if you really feel that I’ve embarrassed you, as that was not my intent. I have found your posts to be informative, well-informed, and stimulating.
Beyond apologies, all I can offer is my best attempt to exercise a modicum of self-control. I hope that my endeavor is both successful and sufficient.
DS (may I call you DS?), I realize that for the sake of clarity, you’re presenting the most simplified scenario possible. As such, I have no real conception of what it means for memory to “match” current sensory input, or what’s entailed in the memory “reaction” preempting the sensory/motor connection.
But I catch your drift. Let’s take a crack at this and fill in the blanks only if necessary.
Well, it seems to be doing some sort of information processing, and I’m not so sure “information” is physical. Other than that: not as far as I can tell.
I don’t see why that scenario couldn’t take place with no awareness whatsoever.
Also, I don’t get the “rudimentary” part. If awareness is a continuum from “rudimentary” to “full-blown”, where’s the cutoff point? More importantly, why is there a cutoff point?
To run with your analogy, “awareness”, then, is a combination of hardware and software. Some folks think software is abstract and non-physical; therefore awareness would have at least some non-physical aspects. Other folks think software is just a different way to talk about hardware; IOW, it’s all physical. But then we run into Tris’s problem: why isn’t awareness associated with all physical processes?
You may call me whatever you like. I’d request that you alert me beforehand if it’s not obvious, just so’s I know my denotation. Oh, I’d also appreciate it if you’d not choose a 'cuss word to refer to me; I have enough people in real life doing that.
Yes, I realize that there are huge gaps. I would hope to establish a “big picture”, top-down view that might provide a viable guide to then filling in those gaps. Abduction, if you will; guessing at the nature of what might fill the gaps might give us direction on what’s lacking, from a bottom-up perspective. (Incidentally, “abduction” takes another role in this debate as one of the reasons that Fodor rejects the computational model of mind. See Pinker’s response (warning - PDF file) for more.)
I think that this is why it is important to agree that “memory” (i.e., information) has a physical basis (or “nature”, as SentientMeat says).
In answer to (1), that is exactly my question. If it could take place without awareness, then we have not specified all of the conditions necessary for awareness. This ties into the answer to (2), which is that I’m trying to establish a minimum set of criteria for what constitutes “awareness”. As has been demonstrated throughout this thread, it seems to me that to most people there is a continuum involved in defining “awareness” (e.g., a nuclear reactor, a bee, a chimpanzee, a human). We’ve eliminated amoeba from contention, for the same reason that we keep red balls and cadavers out of our exclusive “awareness club”. I’m simply trying to separate “awareness” at its minimum level from any specific instance that may include other characteristics that are non-essential to awareness (e.g., humans and a “moral” sense).
To clarify the record, Digital, I’ve not said that awareness requires a moral sense, and in fact have said specifically that it does not. I realize that you didn’t attribute that to me, but I’m the one who raised morality when responding to the issue of determinism, so someone might misconstrue what you said. Humans are not necessarily required, but some mechanism for the processing of immediate memory is. In addition, and having nothing to do with the former disclaimer, I’d like to say that do I not think that awareness and information are synonymous.
As a computer scientist, let me try this one. The trick here is that software can always be implemented in hardware. The genius of the general purpose computer is that its hardware is such that it can process various bits of software (hah! bits!) without being physically reconfigured. Although the “no physical reconfiguration” isn’t even a requirement, if you look into FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays).
Oh, I didn’t think that you did say that awareness required a moral sense and appreciate your pointing it out. Sorry if it came across that way; it’s exactly the sentiment that I’m trying to avoid, as it tends to confuse the discussion by bringing “extra stuff” in.
And I absolutely agree that information is not awareness. However, I think that the former is necessary for the latter. And furthermore, I’d say that “memory” is a form of “information” that has a physical basis. Would you agree?
Actually, as I wrote just a few posts above (the long one), I believe that familiarity is what is necessary for awareness. Just how that works, I explained in quite some detail. Our deductions have not yet taken us to the conclusion that memory is physical, but it might. Other-wise and I decided some time back to take things a few steps at a time. You may review the aforementioned post to see the current status of the deductive process. I think you might enjoy some of the rather remarkable implications that have been made (such as, that it is impossible ever to have the same memory twice.)
Ack. This is so frustrating. I am so close to agreeing with everything you wrote there (at least at a high level), it’s aggravating to not be able to. There’s some detail that I haven’t yet put my finger on that is nagging me. I think it has a cart-before-the-horse character, but haven’t yet identified it well enough to say more. I need time to ponder, while also getting some work done.
And yes, I agree that it is impossible, in principle, to have the same memory twice. I think that can be easily handled via filtering and such, but have deeper issues with abstraction formation (which, after all, is just induction). But I get ahead of myself, yet again.
Huh. I’m stymied. Excellent question. It is obvious to me that there is no physical reconfiguration. Yet, there is a change in state. Alex, I’ll take Ship of Theseus for $1000.
I think that if you grant continuity to physical objects, there’s no question here. If you don’t, then everything goes out the window anyway and there are much bigger problems, of which this is a piddling detail. I know which I choose. Perhaps there are subsequent issues that will rear their ugly, ugly heads later, but I’ll put them off until then.
Well, there was considerable deduction that preceded it in prior posts, which might account for some of the cart/horse feeling. Feel free to go back, if you wish, to where Other-wise and I first began. It has come quite a ways since I told you that I wasn’t ready yet to define awareness. It is only in that last post that I defined it to my own satisfaction.
