Question for all of you: Is our subconscious conscious? That is, are parts of us conscious? “I” am the top-level consciousness thinking about what I’m typing right now. But all sorts of lower-level processes are going on below “my” consciousness. Are any of them themselves conscious? Do we have any way of predicting or testing whether they are?
Tononi’s information-theoretic “information integration” measure (based on mutual information between components) could tell you “how conscious” a well-specified circuit was; but I regard it as an interesting correlate of processing power, without any demonstrated or even argued logical relationship to consciousness. Tononi has published a lot of papers on it—and they became more widely-cited when he started saying they were about consciousness instead of saying they were about information integration—but he didn’t AFAIK make any arguments that the thing he measures with information integration has something to do with consciousness.
It’s a very interesting question. I think it’s pretty straight-forward that ‘ourselves’ is a composite of ‘awarenesses’ with non-overlapping mutual awareness.
Some data with respect to inebriation:
drunk people would pass a Turing test, but the next morning when events are recalled, it feels like someone else’ experiences. But then when drunk again, the experiences again feel immediate.
when I lived in France, most of my socialization time was spent inebriated. For years thereafter, whenever I was intoxicated, I felt like it was more natural to speak in French than English. Even now, my French vocabulary is accessible after a glass of wine.
That is interesting, but not what I was trying to ask. I was trying to ask if there could be separate, smaller, less-complex, non-human consciousnesses inside every human, It seems plausible (not probable, plausible) that there are, and that we currently have no way of detecting whether that is the case.
It’s a very important question, if you hope for a future that contains consciousness. You aren’t going to be the singleton. You’re going to be a piece of a singleton.
Edited later for niceness. But not because of your downvotes, which I also do not respect. I felt like a hypocrite for having told people to be nice.
Question for all of you: Is our subconscious conscious? That is, are parts of us conscious? “I” am the top-level consciousness thinking about what I’m typing right now. But all sorts of lower-level processes are going on below “my” consciousness. Are any of them themselves conscious? Do we have any way of predicting or testing whether they are?
Tononi’s information-theoretic “information integration” measure (based on mutual information between components) could tell you “how conscious” a well-specified circuit was; but I regard it as an interesting correlate of processing power, without any demonstrated or even argued logical relationship to consciousness. Tononi has published a lot of papers on it—and they became more widely-cited when he started saying they were about consciousness instead of saying they were about information integration—but he didn’t AFAIK make any arguments that the thing he measures with information integration has something to do with consciousness.
It’s a very interesting question. I think it’s pretty straight-forward that ‘ourselves’ is a composite of ‘awarenesses’ with non-overlapping mutual awareness.
Some data with respect to inebriation:
drunk people would pass a Turing test, but the next morning when events are recalled, it feels like someone else’ experiences. But then when drunk again, the experiences again feel immediate.
when I lived in France, most of my socialization time was spent inebriated. For years thereafter, whenever I was intoxicated, I felt like it was more natural to speak in French than English. Even now, my French vocabulary is accessible after a glass of wine.
That is interesting, but not what I was trying to ask. I was trying to ask if there could be separate, smaller, less-complex, non-human consciousnesses inside every human, It seems plausible (not probable, plausible) that there are, and that we currently have no way of detecting whether that is the case.
It’s a very important question, if you hope for a future that contains consciousness. You aren’t going to be the singleton. You’re going to be a piece of a singleton.
Edited later for niceness. But not because of your downvotes, which I also do not respect. I felt like a hypocrite for having told people to be nice.
you seem very confident about that, did you downvote your own post? how do you do that.