Good idea. and since Daedalus mentions that he is new lets also give him a link that explains why tabooing a word can be a useful way to facilitate understanding of a topic.
How about: consciousness is a sensory input that senses the brains own internal state and of which the brain makes use in the same way as it’s other senses.
Consciousness actually means a number of different things, so any one definition will make discussion problematic. There really should be a number of different definitions for qualia/subjective consciousness, empirical consciousness etc.
nawitus, my post was too long as it is. If I had included multiple discussions of multiple definitions of consciousness and qualia, you would either still be reading it or would have stopped because it was too long.
And that’s why we need an article somewhere which would define some common terms, so you don’t have to define them all over again in every article about consciousness.
[Consciousness] :The subjective state of being self-aware that one is an autonomous entity that can differentially regulate what one is thinking about.
So, for example, any computer program that has the ability to to parse and understand relevant features of its own source code and also happens to have a few ‘if’ statements in some of the relevant areas.
It may actually exclude certain humans that I would consider conscious. (I believe Yvain mentioned this too.)
I am talking about minimum requirements, not sufficient requirements.
I am not sure what you mean by “understand relevant features of its own source code”.
I don’t know any humans that I would consider conscious that don’t fit the definition of consciousness that I am using. If you have a different definition I would be happy to consider it.
I am talking about minimum requirements, not sufficient requirements.
Those two seem to be the same thing in this context.
If you have a different definition I would be happy to consider it.
No, it’s as good as any. Yet the ‘any’ I’ve seen are all incomplete. Just be very careful that when you are discussing one element of ‘consciousness’ you are careful to only come to conclusions that require that element of consciousness and not some part of consciousness that is not included in your definition. For example I don’t consider the above definition to be at all relevant to the Fermi paradox.
To be a car; a machine at a minimum must have wheels. Wheels are not sufficient to make a machine into a car.
To be conscious, an entity must be self-aware of self-consciousness. To be self-aware of self-consciousness an entity must have a “self-consciousness-detector” A self-consciousness-detector requires data and computation resources to do the pattern recognition necessary to detect self-consciousness.
What else consciousness requires I don’t know, but I know it must require detection of self-consciousness.
I’m not convinced it is even necessary. For example, I did not learn that I am conscious by using a consciousness detector. Instead, I was taught that I am conscious. It happened in fifth grade Spelling class. I recall that I learned both the word “conscious” and “unconscious” that day, and I unlearned the non-word “unconscience”.
I sometimes think that philosophers pretend too strenuously that we all work out these things logically as adults, when we all know that the reality is that we are catechised into them as children.
perplexed, how do you know you do not have a consciousness detector?
Do you see because you use a light detector? Or because you use your eyes? Or because you learned what the word “see” means?
When you understand spoken language do you use a sound detector? A word detector? Do the parts of your brain that you use to decode sounds into words into language into meaning not do computations on the signals those parts receive from your ears?
The only reason you can think a thought is because there are neural structures that are instantiating that thought. If your neural structures were incapable of instantiating a thought, you would be unable to think that thought.
Many people are unable to think many thoughts. It takes many years to train a brain to be able to think about quantum mechanics. I am unable to think accurately about quantum mechanics. My brain does not have the neural structures to do so. My brain also does not have the neural structures to understand Chinese. If it did, I would be able to understand Chinese, which I cannot do.
There has to be a one-to-one correspondence between the neural structures that instantiate a mental activity and the ability to do that mental activity. The brain is not magic; it is chemistry and physics just like everything else. If a brain can do something it is because it has the structures that can do it.
Why is consciousness different than sight or hearing? If consciousness is something that can be detected, there needs to be brain structures that are doing the detecting. If consciousness is not something that can be detected, then what is it that we are talking about? This is very basic stuff. I am just stating logical identities here. I don’t understand where the disagreement is coming from.
I don’t understand where the disagreement is coming from.
I’m not sure there is a disagreement. As I said, I don’t spend much time thinking about consciousness, and even less time reading about it, so please bear with me as I struggle to communicate.
Suppose I have a genetic defect such that my consciousness detector is broken. How would I know that? As I say, I didn’t discover that I am conscious by introspection. I was told that I am conscious when I was young enough to believe what I was told. I was told that all the other people I know are conscious—except maybe when they are asleep or knocked out after a fall. I was told that no one really knows for sure whether my dog Cookie was conscious. But that the ants in my ant farm almost certainly were not. Based on this information, I constructed a kind of operational definition for the term. But I really had (and still have) no idea whether my definition matched anyone else’s.
But here is the thing. I have a friend whose color-red qualia detector has a genetic defect. He learned the meaning of the word “red” and the word “green” as a child just like me. But he didn’t know that he had learned the wrong meanings until a teacher became suspicious and sent him to have his vision checked. See, they can detect defects in color-red qualia detectors. So, he knows his is defective. He now knows that when he was told the meaning of the word red by example, he got the wrong idea.
So how do I know that my consciousness detector is working? I do notice that even though most people were told the meaning of the word back in grade school just like me, they don’t all seem to have the same idea. Are some of their consciousness detectors broken? Is mine broken? Are you and I in disagreement? If you think that we are in disagreement, do you now understand where the disagreement is coming from? One thing I am pretty sure of: if I do have a broken consciousness detector due to a genetic defect, this defect hasn’t really hurt me too much. It doesn’t seem to be something crucial. I do fine just recognizing people and assuming that they are all conscious, including myself. But perhaps I am a zombie. I just don’t know it because my detector is broken.
Assume you do, in fact, have a consciousness detector. Do you trust it to work correctly in weird edge cases?
Humans have fairly advanced hardwired circuitry for detecting other humans, but our human detectors fail completely when presented with a photograph or a movie screen. We see a picture of a human, and it looks like a human.
That seems like a very confusing way of saying this. You aren’t ‘self aware of self consciousness’, self consciousness is, as far as I can tell in this context, equivalent to self awareness. The phrase totally redundant. The only meaningful reduction I can make out here is that you think to be conscious a person has to be self aware.
I think it’s probably a mistake to propose a “self consciousness detector”. What is really going on? You can focus on previously made patterns of thought and actions and ask questions about them for future reference. Why did I do this? Why did I think that? You are noticing a very complex internal process and in doing so applying another complex internal process to the memory of that process in order to gather useful or attractive (I am ignorant of the physical processes that dictate when and about what we think about during metacognition) information.
“self-aware” “differentially regulate” and “what one is thinking about” carry almost as much baggage as consciousness. I’m not sure that this particularly unpacking helps much.
This needs further unpacking—you seem to be referring to (at least) 3 things simultaneously: Qualia, Self-Awareness, and Executive Control.
I can imagine having any one of those without the others, which may be why so many people are disputing some of your assertions, and why your post seems so disorganized.
I interpret your definition as being specifically about self-consciousness, not consciousness in general. Is this a good interpretation?
Do you mean explicit (conceptual) self-awareness or implicit self-awareness, or both? If the former, young children probably wouldn’t be conscious, but if the latter, then just about every animal would be.
daedalus2u, taboo “consciousness”.
Good idea. and since Daedalus mentions that he is new lets also give him a link that explains why tabooing a word can be a useful way to facilitate understanding of a topic.
How about: consciousness is a sensory input that senses the brains own internal state and of which the brain makes use in the same way as it’s other senses.
That sound a lot like this “Global Workspace” theory about consciousness. Just ran across this.
Consciousness actually means a number of different things, so any one definition will make discussion problematic. There really should be a number of different definitions for qualia/subjective consciousness, empirical consciousness etc.
nawitus, my post was too long as it is. If I had included multiple discussions of multiple definitions of consciousness and qualia, you would either still be reading it or would have stopped because it was too long.
And that’s why we need an article somewhere which would define some common terms, so you don’t have to define them all over again in every article about consciousness.
[Consciousness] :The subjective state of being self-aware that one is an autonomous entity that can differentially regulate what one is thinking about.
So, for example, any computer program that has the ability to to parse and understand relevant features of its own source code and also happens to have a few ‘if’ statements in some of the relevant areas.
It may actually exclude certain humans that I would consider conscious. (I believe Yvain mentioned this too.)
I am talking about minimum requirements, not sufficient requirements.
I am not sure what you mean by “understand relevant features of its own source code”.
I don’t know any humans that I would consider conscious that don’t fit the definition of consciousness that I am using. If you have a different definition I would be happy to consider it.
Those two seem to be the same thing in this context.
No, it’s as good as any. Yet the ‘any’ I’ve seen are all incomplete. Just be very careful that when you are discussing one element of ‘consciousness’ you are careful to only come to conclusions that require that element of consciousness and not some part of consciousness that is not included in your definition. For example I don’t consider the above definition to be at all relevant to the Fermi paradox.
To be a car; a machine at a minimum must have wheels. Wheels are not sufficient to make a machine into a car.
To be conscious, an entity must be self-aware of self-consciousness. To be self-aware of self-consciousness an entity must have a “self-consciousness-detector” A self-consciousness-detector requires data and computation resources to do the pattern recognition necessary to detect self-consciousness.
What else consciousness requires I don’t know, but I know it must require detection of self-consciousness.
“Necessary” but not sufficient.
I’m not convinced it is even necessary. For example, I did not learn that I am conscious by using a consciousness detector. Instead, I was taught that I am conscious. It happened in fifth grade Spelling class. I recall that I learned both the word “conscious” and “unconscious” that day, and I unlearned the non-word “unconscience”.
I sometimes think that philosophers pretend too strenuously that we all work out these things logically as adults, when we all know that the reality is that we are catechised into them as children.
perplexed, how do you know you do not have a consciousness detector?
Do you see because you use a light detector? Or because you use your eyes? Or because you learned what the word “see” means?
When you understand spoken language do you use a sound detector? A word detector? Do the parts of your brain that you use to decode sounds into words into language into meaning not do computations on the signals those parts receive from your ears?
The only reason you can think a thought is because there are neural structures that are instantiating that thought. If your neural structures were incapable of instantiating a thought, you would be unable to think that thought.
Many people are unable to think many thoughts. It takes many years to train a brain to be able to think about quantum mechanics. I am unable to think accurately about quantum mechanics. My brain does not have the neural structures to do so. My brain also does not have the neural structures to understand Chinese. If it did, I would be able to understand Chinese, which I cannot do.
There has to be a one-to-one correspondence between the neural structures that instantiate a mental activity and the ability to do that mental activity. The brain is not magic; it is chemistry and physics just like everything else. If a brain can do something it is because it has the structures that can do it.
Why is consciousness different than sight or hearing? If consciousness is something that can be detected, there needs to be brain structures that are doing the detecting. If consciousness is not something that can be detected, then what is it that we are talking about? This is very basic stuff. I am just stating logical identities here. I don’t understand where the disagreement is coming from.
I’m not sure there is a disagreement. As I said, I don’t spend much time thinking about consciousness, and even less time reading about it, so please bear with me as I struggle to communicate.
Suppose I have a genetic defect such that my consciousness detector is broken. How would I know that? As I say, I didn’t discover that I am conscious by introspection. I was told that I am conscious when I was young enough to believe what I was told. I was told that all the other people I know are conscious—except maybe when they are asleep or knocked out after a fall. I was told that no one really knows for sure whether my dog Cookie was conscious. But that the ants in my ant farm almost certainly were not. Based on this information, I constructed a kind of operational definition for the term. But I really had (and still have) no idea whether my definition matched anyone else’s.
But here is the thing. I have a friend whose color-red qualia detector has a genetic defect. He learned the meaning of the word “red” and the word “green” as a child just like me. But he didn’t know that he had learned the wrong meanings until a teacher became suspicious and sent him to have his vision checked. See, they can detect defects in color-red qualia detectors. So, he knows his is defective. He now knows that when he was told the meaning of the word red by example, he got the wrong idea.
So how do I know that my consciousness detector is working? I do notice that even though most people were told the meaning of the word back in grade school just like me, they don’t all seem to have the same idea. Are some of their consciousness detectors broken? Is mine broken? Are you and I in disagreement? If you think that we are in disagreement, do you now understand where the disagreement is coming from? One thing I am pretty sure of: if I do have a broken consciousness detector due to a genetic defect, this defect hasn’t really hurt me too much. It doesn’t seem to be something crucial. I do fine just recognizing people and assuming that they are all conscious, including myself. But perhaps I am a zombie. I just don’t know it because my detector is broken.
Assume you do, in fact, have a consciousness detector. Do you trust it to work correctly in weird edge cases?
Humans have fairly advanced hardwired circuitry for detecting other humans, but our human detectors fail completely when presented with a photograph or a movie screen. We see a picture of a human, and it looks like a human.
That seems like a very confusing way of saying this. You aren’t ‘self aware of self consciousness’, self consciousness is, as far as I can tell in this context, equivalent to self awareness. The phrase totally redundant. The only meaningful reduction I can make out here is that you think to be conscious a person has to be self aware.
I think it’s probably a mistake to propose a “self consciousness detector”. What is really going on? You can focus on previously made patterns of thought and actions and ask questions about them for future reference. Why did I do this? Why did I think that? You are noticing a very complex internal process and in doing so applying another complex internal process to the memory of that process in order to gather useful or attractive (I am ignorant of the physical processes that dictate when and about what we think about during metacognition) information.
“self-aware” “differentially regulate” and “what one is thinking about” carry almost as much baggage as consciousness. I’m not sure that this particularly unpacking helps much.
This needs further unpacking—you seem to be referring to (at least) 3 things simultaneously: Qualia, Self-Awareness, and Executive Control.
I can imagine having any one of those without the others, which may be why so many people are disputing some of your assertions, and why your post seems so disorganized.
Is memory necessary?
I interpret your definition as being specifically about self-consciousness, not consciousness in general. Is this a good interpretation?
Do you mean explicit (conceptual) self-awareness or implicit self-awareness, or both? If the former, young children probably wouldn’t be conscious, but if the latter, then just about every animal would be.