The real question to ask about personal conciousness , is 'why are you peering out of your eyes, and not the other guys eyes, why are you inside of your brain and not the other guys brain…
Why am I me and not him, so to speak. What differentiates your meness from the other guys meness. Is it a physical property?
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What is consciousness? (11-Jun-1999)
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To answer your questions:
I am looking out of my eyes instead of your eyes because your eyes aren’t attached to my optic nerves.
The difference between my meness and your meness is that my brain is physically different from your brain.
Hi, folks. What, wrong consciousness question, apparently? Well, the best I’ve read on the subject so far is the book Goedel, Escher, Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter. While it is more than 600 words (more like 700 pages) it does deal with most of the questions tying into the concept of artificial intelligence, such as consciousness, logical systems, complexity, holistic versus fragmentary. It also happens to be one of my five most favorite books ever. It is a seemingly roundabout treatise but after a while you gain the understanding that it’s only appropriate to go about it this way. If you can’t get it at the library, make them buy one, or buy one and give it to them!
One of his core ideas is that consciousness involves coping with self-reference and self-representation. If you can do these things without being too shallow and without getting lost in strange loops of logic, you have what it takes to be conscious. Of course, I have friends who can’t tell a double entendre from a ford fender, but I don’t go checking for their battery pack…
I thought the column was pretty wanting, although he did warn us it’s a tough question to answer in 600 words.
Nevertheless, I was surprised he didn’t brind up two very important points-
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Consciousness is usually understood to include self-awareness.
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Just because something is hard to measure or perceive, doesn’t mean that it’s not important in understanding reality. In other words, just because metrics of consciousness are very hard to think of, and just because we may fail to properly measure consciousness from its artifacts, doesn’t mean that the model that simulates consciousness is.
It’s a frustrating reality, but to call a system ‘consciousness’ because we can’t distinguish it from true consciousness is a copout.
It’s analogous to saying identical twins (with hypothetical identical fingerprints) are the same person, because we can’t distinguish them when one or the other walks in the room. It’s convenient, but it’s not so.
- Although I’ve never conversed with you, Opal, “hello.”
I’m always interested that when somebody asks the question, “What is consciousness?”, the answer is usually of the form, “Well, we’re trying to simulate it with computers and we’re having these problems.” I would like the question addressed from the other direction.
I know that there’s a hell of a lot of brain research going on, trying to figure out how that lump of wet dust manages to think and reason. Assuming we omit super-natural mechanisms from the discussion, where are we at understanding the electrical and chemical processes that result in a hankerin for sushi?