Re: Does Searle's "Chinese Room" argument imply that consciousness is non-scientific?

JGCASEY <jgkjcasey@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 28, 10:20 am, forbisga...@xxxxxxx wrote:
On Sep 27, 6:14 am, Wolf Kirchmeir <ElLoboVi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:





forbisga...@xxxxxxx wrote:
On Sep 27, 12:30 am, c...@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) wrote:

What I reject as being so unlikely it's not even work talking
about (except for the fact that a huge percentage of the world
doesn't reject it so I keep having to talk about it), is the
belief that consciousness is anything other than just more of the
same - the behavior of atoms.

If that were only true. You also reject the notion that
consciousness is the behavior of the atoms. I say this because you
hold that computers
are or can be conscious even though they are composes of completely
different atoms and structures of atoms. You claim that
consciousness rest upon the behviors of sturctures at such a high
level that they are atom type independent (similar to a ball, whose
behaviors don't depend upon rubber for its bounciness.)

Erm, the material of a ball does affect its bounciness. Drop a rubber
ball and a plasticine one, and see... ;-)- Hide quoted text -

Yeah, that the idea. Now tell me. Where is the same experiment
for consciousness?

There have been experiments that seem to relate to
what we call consciousness such as the experiments
done by Benjamin Libet, those with split brain subjects,
and blind sight and so on ...

Some images that can be seen two ways such as the
Necker cube or the faces or the vase and so on seem
to indicate there is only one object of consciousness.

Then there is the temporal limit of being conscious
of two events below which the events meld as one.
Or the temporal limit of melding a sequence of events
as a single conscious unit which appears to be up to
three seconds.

Another observation I mentioned in other posts was
the limit of short term memory to an average of seven
items may actually be a temporal limit.

This is something I couldn't understand about Curt's
stance on the subject as being "nothing but moving
atoms" which although may be true doesn't explain in
what way it is "nothing but moving atoms" any more
than explaining how an engine works by saying it is
nothing but moving physical parts.

I only talk about "nothing but moving atoms" when people write stupid ***
about consciousness being some magic sauce that emerges out of the brain
with undefined properties.

I talk about the brain being a collection of pattern matching circuits when
people want to talk about how the brain creates awareness or in how it
creates a model of the environment.

All the stuff you talked about above, such a the brain's limit on short
term memory, can easily be understood as limits of the powers of the
patterning matching circuits. If the temporal pattern matching circuits
can not match temporal patterns more than 10 seconds back in time, then
this directly translates to the idea that the network of pattern matching
circuits only has a short term memory of 10 seconds. In fact, different
pattern matching circuits in the brain stretch over different time lengths
so the net effect is a "fading of memory" over time instead of their being
a hard 10 second limit.

None of this is new. I've been talking about all these things for years
here.

If you want to understand how short term memory works, it's stupid to think
about it as "nothing but atoms". That's why I don't think about like that,
or use those concepts in threads where we are talking about short term
memory.

If you want specific examples of how you might build a network of temporal
pattern matching circuits, look at the code you wrote which implements some
of my network ideas - that's what they are. networks of temporal pattern
matching circuits - not "just atoms". They have conscious awareness of the
patterns they are able to sense - the same sort of conscious awareness any
network of temporal pattern matching circuits has and the same sort of
conscious awareness humans have because that's all a human brain is, a
network of temporal pattern matching circuits. You don't need to go any
further than that into the details to understand human consciousness.

Maybe these gross over simplifications (or powers of
abstraction as Curt seems to view these "explanations")
is what attracts people to radical behaviorism where
something like "praise" or " beauty" is nothing but
a stimulus, no more explanations required!

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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