Apologies for commenting without reading the entire post, but I’m just going to give my rant about this particular aspect of the topic. It’s about the opening definition of your post, so it’s kinda central.
Consciousness is the state of being aware of one’s existence, sensations and thoughts
I think defining consciousness as self-awareness is just such a non-starter. It’s not what realists mean by consciousness, and even if you’re taking an illusionist point of view, it doesn’t capture most of what consciousness-the-fuzzy-high-level-category does in the brain.
As David Pearce has pointed out, a lot of the most intense conscious experiences don’t include any self-awareness/reflection at all, just as being in a state of panic running away from a fire. Or taking psychedelics. Or being in intense pain. Or intense pleasure. Conversely, it’s not that difficult to include some degree of elementary self-awareness in a machine, and I don’t think that would make it conscious. (Again, neither in the realist sense, nor in the consciousness-as-a-fuzzy-category sense. There are just so many functions that consciousness does for humans that don’t have anything to do with self-awareness.)
The highest entropy input channel, as far as conscious content is concerned, is undoubtedly vision. The conscious aspect is continuously present, and it’s pretty difficult to explain (how can we perceive an entire image at the same time? What does that even mean?), and there’s evidence that it’s a separate thing from template-based visual processing (-> blindsight). Imho people talk way too much about self-reference when it comes to consciousness, and way too little about vision.
The definition that I used isn’t that important to the piece to be honest. It was a segue into my other points. I would appreciate your thoughts on the insights I presented over the semantics.
I’ll read it (& comment if I have anything to say). But man the definition for the concept your post is about is pretty important, even if it’s “semantics”. Specifically, if this post were actually just about self-awareness (which does not seem to be the case, from a first skim), then I wouldn’t even be interested in reading it because I don’t think self-awareness is particularly related to consciousness, and it’s not a topic I’m separately interested in. Maybe edit it? If you’re not just talking about X, then no reason to open the post by saying that you are.
Edit: actually I gave up reading it (but this has nothing to do with the opening paragraph), I find it very difficult to follow/understand where you’re trying to go with it. I think you have to motivate this better to keep people interested. (Why is the time gap important? Why is the pathway important? What exactly is this post even about?) I didn’t downvote though.
Apologies for commenting without reading the entire post, but I’m just going to give my rant about this particular aspect of the topic. It’s about the opening definition of your post, so it’s kinda central.
I think defining consciousness as self-awareness is just such a non-starter. It’s not what realists mean by consciousness, and even if you’re taking an illusionist point of view, it doesn’t capture most of what consciousness-the-fuzzy-high-level-category does in the brain.
As David Pearce has pointed out, a lot of the most intense conscious experiences don’t include any self-awareness/reflection at all, just as being in a state of panic running away from a fire. Or taking psychedelics. Or being in intense pain. Or intense pleasure. Conversely, it’s not that difficult to include some degree of elementary self-awareness in a machine, and I don’t think that would make it conscious. (Again, neither in the realist sense, nor in the consciousness-as-a-fuzzy-category sense. There are just so many functions that consciousness does for humans that don’t have anything to do with self-awareness.)
The highest entropy input channel, as far as conscious content is concerned, is undoubtedly vision. The conscious aspect is continuously present, and it’s pretty difficult to explain (how can we perceive an entire image at the same time? What does that even mean?), and there’s evidence that it’s a separate thing from template-based visual processing (-> blindsight). Imho people talk way too much about self-reference when it comes to consciousness, and way too little about vision.
The definition that I used isn’t that important to the piece to be honest. It was a segue into my other points. I would appreciate your thoughts on the insights I presented over the semantics.
I’ll read it (& comment if I have anything to say). But man the definition for the concept your post is about is pretty important, even if it’s “semantics”. Specifically, if this post were actually just about self-awareness (which does not seem to be the case, from a first skim), then I wouldn’t even be interested in reading it because I don’t think self-awareness is particularly related to consciousness, and it’s not a topic I’m separately interested in. Maybe edit it? If you’re not just talking about X, then no reason to open the post by saying that you are.
Edit: actually I gave up reading it (but this has nothing to do with the opening paragraph), I find it very difficult to follow/understand where you’re trying to go with it. I think you have to motivate this better to keep people interested. (Why is the time gap important? Why is the pathway important? What exactly is this post even about?) I didn’t downvote though.
Thats a fair point, I probably should!