Speaking of Blindsight, Watts drew heavily on Metzinger’s Being No One. One of my favorite Watts blog posts was his post on the PRISM model of consciousness http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791 and to quote from the PRISM guy:
“…One could imagine a conscious nervous system that operates as humans do but does not suffer any internal strife. In such a system, knowledge guiding skeletomotor action would be isomorphic to, and never at odds with, the nature of the phenomenal state — running across the hot desert sand in order to reach water would actually feel good, because performing the action is deemed adaptive. Why our nervous system does not operate with such harmony is perhaps a question that only evolutionary biology can answer. Certainly one can imagine such integration occurring without anything like phenomenal states, but from the present standpoint, this reflects more one’s powers of imagination than what has occurred in the course of evolutionary history.”
I’d guess because pain has to be immediate to be of value, so the more processing you heap on it the less useful it becomes; and species tend to evolve pain before they evolve utility-judging systems.
I’m not quite sure if I think that the PRISM theory is particularly accurate though. There are plenty of animals that can mediate between conflicting impulses, which don’t seem very conscious. Like cows, or frogs. It seems plausible that people may have already built robots that do this.
I’m fairly capable of imagining living in my body while everything below my neck exhibits goal-oriented behavior without my input. I think I would still be conscious in that state.
So I don’t really think that consciousness is the phenomena of mediating between conflicted motor impulses.
I’m with Kaj on this. One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. I don’t mind counting frogs or cows as partially conscious to the extent they reconcile conflicting impulses, and I don’t understand why you take such a viewpoint as a refutation of PRISM. Why is consciousness all-or-nothing, rather than a matter of degrees?
It’s definitely a matter of degree, but I don’t think that humans being more conscious is a result of being more able to reconcile conflicting impulses. I think of the refutation as more being in my second paragraph.
Imagine if a friend of yours suddenly somehow lost all control of their body except for their mouth. They do things, and have introspective access to why, and can talk about what they’re doing, but take no part in actually deciding what to do.
I would still consider them to be conscious, and intuitively think that something that is more able to talk about itself is more conscious, more so than I think that being able to decide makes something conscious.
Human consciousness can mediate internal conflicts, but I don’t think that internal conflict mediation is a sufficient condition for consciousness.
Imagine if a friend of yours suddenly somehow lost all control of their body except for their mouth. They do things, and have introspective access to why, and can talk about what they’re doing, but take no part in actually deciding what to do. I would still consider them to be conscious, and intuitively think that something that is more able to talk about itself is more conscious, more so than I think that being able to decide makes something conscious.
The degree vs kind distinction still works for that. You’re just proposing a slippery slope and denying the first step is downward. Keep taking your friend and chopping away capabilities (more capabilities means more possibilities means more potential for conflict) - chop away their long-term memory, short-term memory, random senses, etc.
Where do you say they begin to lose some consciousness? I’m happy to say that they lose a little bit every time, with some losses being reparable over time and the exact loss.
(And I wonder how conscious your friend would actually be. Certainly, there’s a lot of potential there, but judging from float tanks and the psychological effects of isolation tanks...)
Intuitively, I think they stop being conscious when they stop being able to talk to me about what they subjectively think about the world.
Not being able to control your body makes you a bit less conscious, but not nearly as much as removing long term memory. I don’t think that the degree of conflict is as important as the degree of representation.
Confusion on “subjectively think”:
I think that this is a proxy for having an experience of the world, qualia and that sort of thing.
Confusion on being “able to talk”:
I can have an inner dialogue without opening my mouth and vocalizing to other people, and I still report consciousness. If I had magical telepathy powers that let me access someone’s inner dialogue without them talking, then they would probably be able to convince me of their consciousness.
Those are really just the ideas that I’m using to think about this. Since they seem really important to what I personally mean when I say consciousness, I don’t think its the ability to mediate internal conflicts.
(And I wonder how conscious your friend would actually be. Certainly, there’s a lot of potential there, but judging from float tanks and the psychological effects of isolation tanks...)
I feel like the losing consciousness is probably a result of losing sensory input on which to base a model of the world. When your world model is gone, its harder to talk about things.
You only have as many qualia as you need to; sensory data is discarded as much as possible. (Look at meditation, how much one experiences but does not notice. Look at dreams—they seem vivid and real, until one tries to see specific detail like reading written material.) And what one perceives is strongly shaped by what one expects (eg. the ba-ga experiment or the entire prediction-is-intelligence line of thought—On Intelligence comes to mind). Look at how the mind shuts down when there is little to do, in things like highway hypnosis.
Upon reading the papers, it seems like were talking about different things.
I was talking about what I thought consciousness was (like, what I would label as conscious and unconscious), and I think you were talking about what it does/is for.
Speaking of Blindsight, Watts drew heavily on Metzinger’s Being No One. One of my favorite Watts blog posts was his post on the PRISM model of consciousness http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791 and to quote from the PRISM guy:
I’d guess because pain has to be immediate to be of value, so the more processing you heap on it the less useful it becomes; and species tend to evolve pain before they evolve utility-judging systems.
Awesome link!
I’m not quite sure if I think that the PRISM theory is particularly accurate though. There are plenty of animals that can mediate between conflicting impulses, which don’t seem very conscious. Like cows, or frogs. It seems plausible that people may have already built robots that do this.
I’m fairly capable of imagining living in my body while everything below my neck exhibits goal-oriented behavior without my input. I think I would still be conscious in that state.
So I don’t really think that consciousness is the phenomena of mediating between conflicted motor impulses.
What makes you think that? I’m not entirely sure of frogs, but cows seem obviously conscious to me.
I’m with Kaj on this. One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. I don’t mind counting frogs or cows as partially conscious to the extent they reconcile conflicting impulses, and I don’t understand why you take such a viewpoint as a refutation of PRISM. Why is consciousness all-or-nothing, rather than a matter of degrees?
It’s definitely a matter of degree, but I don’t think that humans being more conscious is a result of being more able to reconcile conflicting impulses. I think of the refutation as more being in my second paragraph.
Imagine if a friend of yours suddenly somehow lost all control of their body except for their mouth. They do things, and have introspective access to why, and can talk about what they’re doing, but take no part in actually deciding what to do.
I would still consider them to be conscious, and intuitively think that something that is more able to talk about itself is more conscious, more so than I think that being able to decide makes something conscious.
Human consciousness can mediate internal conflicts, but I don’t think that internal conflict mediation is a sufficient condition for consciousness.
The degree vs kind distinction still works for that. You’re just proposing a slippery slope and denying the first step is downward. Keep taking your friend and chopping away capabilities (more capabilities means more possibilities means more potential for conflict) - chop away their long-term memory, short-term memory, random senses, etc.
Where do you say they begin to lose some consciousness? I’m happy to say that they lose a little bit every time, with some losses being reparable over time and the exact loss.
(And I wonder how conscious your friend would actually be. Certainly, there’s a lot of potential there, but judging from float tanks and the psychological effects of isolation tanks...)
(Notes confusion)
Intuitively, I think they stop being conscious when they stop being able to talk to me about what they subjectively think about the world.
Not being able to control your body makes you a bit less conscious, but not nearly as much as removing long term memory. I don’t think that the degree of conflict is as important as the degree of representation.
Confusion on “subjectively think”:
I think that this is a proxy for having an experience of the world, qualia and that sort of thing.
Confusion on being “able to talk”:
I can have an inner dialogue without opening my mouth and vocalizing to other people, and I still report consciousness. If I had magical telepathy powers that let me access someone’s inner dialogue without them talking, then they would probably be able to convince me of their consciousness.
Those are really just the ideas that I’m using to think about this. Since they seem really important to what I personally mean when I say consciousness, I don’t think its the ability to mediate internal conflicts.
I feel like the losing consciousness is probably a result of losing sensory input on which to base a model of the world. When your world model is gone, its harder to talk about things.
You only have as many qualia as you need to; sensory data is discarded as much as possible. (Look at meditation, how much one experiences but does not notice. Look at dreams—they seem vivid and real, until one tries to see specific detail like reading written material.) And what one perceives is strongly shaped by what one expects (eg. the ba-ga experiment or the entire prediction-is-intelligence line of thought—On Intelligence comes to mind). Look at how the mind shuts down when there is little to do, in things like highway hypnosis.
(Maybe you should read the PRISM papers.)
Upon reading the papers, it seems like were talking about different things.
I was talking about what I thought consciousness was (like, what I would label as conscious and unconscious), and I think you were talking about what it does/is for.
Is there a difference between what something is and what something does?