Re: Self-awareness, consciousness, defined (finally)
- From: Evgenij Barsukov <evgenij_b_no_spam@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 07 Sep 2005 08:33:48 -0500
HMS Beagle wrote:
The thread out of which I am replying has become too large since I have been gone. I am starting it afresh for several reasons. First of all, its obvious noone who posts here has a strict, dilineated, unambiguous defn of the word CONSCIOUSNESS. I am here to wipe away this ambiguity once and for all. To see the post that I am replying to, scroll to the bottom and look for forbisgary@...
I will now define the word consciousness. Hopefully this will clear up the giant threads that form in this group over it.
A conscious human can do the following things, which something which is not conscious cannot do:
1. Refer to his inner mental states. (ex. "I then had to sit down and ponder this conundrum." "I struggled with this issue all night." )
2. A conscious human can imagine himself in a future that has not yet occured, and see himself acting in this future in a third-person perspective. A conscious person can also reason abstractly about this future.
3. A conscious human can imagine himself in the past that already occured, and see himself acting in this past from a third-person perspective. A conscious person can also reflect on this "created" memory of the past.
All parts of your definition reflect nothing else but a mind adaptation
to a group behaviour. Reflecting upon yourself from third person prospective is necessary only to be able to optimize your behaviour inside a group hierarchy. Therefore such ability is well developed in
all group animals. Withous such ability they would not be able to perform as a functional part of a group.
These three things are the DEFINITION of human consciousness. As soon as a living organism is capable of doing these three things, it is conscious by defn. Before you abandon this suggestion, let me first demonstrate to you how applicable it is.
Dogs and cats are not conscious. Although they feel pain and pleasure just as we do, and although they get scared just like we do, they never plan about their future or reflect psychologically on their past. Cats and dogs are capable of rational, even logical thought, but they are forever stuck in a first-person perspective of the world.
> They cannot imagine themselves from a third-person perspective.
Wrong, dogs and rats are both highly social animals, and therefore
third-person prospective is critical for their survival. So, while
their capability to logical though is highly questionable (more likely
their thinking is mostly a multidimmensional correlation which is not
dealing with abstract concepts), their ability to correlate their behaviour from third-person prospecitve is well proven and greatly
developed.
Gerald Edelman points out the following: Although you can kick a dog very hard and make it angry at you, the dog will never plan for two weeks on how to get revenge on you.
However, dog CAN plan it for some time, say few minutes while you are for example on a boat and he is not able to reach you, he will wait for
you on the shore. Ability to correlatively model future is critical for all living beings and is therefore well developed. However, they do not use language (neither externaly nor internaly) therefore they can not plan in term of abstract concepts (later being a side-result of language).
This give them a great disadvantage in effectiveness and extent of
planing, as abstract concepts consitute an enormous reduction of
multi-dimensionality of problems and therefore an enormous computational
improvement. So assming (for simplicity) the same brain (computational) power but not using this multi-dimensionality reduction result of optimization is much less and worse. But it has nothing to do with conciousness, or at least with your definition of it.
From my point of view, what you are trying to do is to give a difference between animals and humans, so what you are trully trying to say, but do not admit is:
*******
consciousness = set of differences between human and animal intelligence
*******
Than you go ahead and defind this set, however doing it wrongly.
The main substantial differences are in ability of humans to
1) use abstract concepts to reduce multidimensionality of problems during internal correlation and optimization
2) share abstract concepts between individuals of the same generation (horizontaly)
3) share abstract concepts between individuals of past/future generations (verticaly).
That's it. If you like to call in cunsciousness, go ahead. But there is realy no other differences between human and animal intelligence except
mentioned above, and third-person behavioural modeling as most definetely not one.
Regards, Evgenij
Gorillas living in the jungles of Africa never build forts from all the tree materal laying around them. Why? The answer is that they are not conscious. It's not as if gorillas do not have hands with which to manipulate forest brush into a fort, its that they are not conscious. A silver back does not even see the use of a fort, because he cannot imagine himself in a future surrounded by a fort.
Although animals have calls and cries and songs for indicating their internal mental state, they are not aware that they are an "agent having a mental state". Although animals are capable of lying with their actions, one will never see an animal lying about their emotions, as TV and stage actors do. Animals do not have even the basic concepts we hold dear such as mental-vs-physical. Although animals have brains that think, they never reflect on themselves as "an agent that is thinking" or as an "agent having an emotion"
Our human consciousness is very natural to us. The mere mention of a fort, and our giant brains immediately conjure up an imaginary situation of ourselves inside one, as well as several logical corrallaries of being in one, such as shelter from rain. No animal does this. Not even dolphins or chimpanzees.
The applicability of this defn of consciousness given above has only begun. One can go onto to see that consciousness is really a product of having a very powerful mental "scratch space" (like RAM in a computer). The mental "space" that humans have is large and complex enough to imagine whole entire scenarios that have never happened, complete with both third-person and first-person perspectives and all the rational power those imbue into imagination.
Certainly the idea that an organism (an unconscious zombie) can be equally as powerful BEHAVIORALLY as a conscious human is absurd. As soon as the zombie refers to his mental states, or behaves in a way that indicates rational planning of future behavior, it is conscious.
On 10 Aug 2005 17:19:24 -0700, forbisgaryg@xxxxxxx wrote:
I'll skip Searle's argument and use a variant of my own.
Occam's Razor tells us not to add unnecessary entities.
Those of us who have awearness and know we have it know we use it to control our behavior. This doesn't mean this is the only way to control behavior, only that that's the way those who know they have it know they do it. It could be the case that awareness is a property of matter or certain matter. I'd like to think so since I'm not all that fond of disembodied awareness.
If awareness is necessary for human performance and humans are machines then no machine without awareness will be able to duplicate human performance. I don't know if awareness is necessary for human performance, I just know I have it and I use it for my performance.
All designed computer performance can be explained without an appeal to awareness. Adding awareness to the mix adds nothing to the explanation of computer performance. If computers can be designed to duplicate human performance then awareness isn't needed to explain it.
The duplication of human performance on a computer would show theorists would have to look elsewhere to explain awareness since human behavior would be explainable without an appeal to awareness.
Not all important behaviors can be duplicated on a computer. For instance, while the behaviors of a set of hydrogen atoms can be simulated on a computer the simulation would not float a real balloon in the same way as a set of hydrogen atoms.
If the physics supporting awareness are tied to the particulars of the physical system, like the properties of hydrogen atoms that allow hydrogen molecules to float a balloon, and awareness is indeed necessary for human performance then before we can design machines that duplicate human performance we will have to have an understanding of the physics supporting awareness and design it into our machines. These machines will not be "computers" in the sense we currently use the term.
.
- References:
- Self-awareness, consciousness, defined (finally)
- From: HMS Beagle
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