![]() ![]() Now, some people would object at this point and say that maybe consciousness is only a subset of what brains compute - that most of brain activity is "unconscious", and thoughts and feelings only become "conscious" when certain special kinds of operations happen. Consciousness is the collection of input operations, intermediate processing, and output behaviors that an entity performs. In other words, consciousness is what minds compute. It is these computations, just from their own perspective of trying to think about themselves. Consciousness is not something separate from or epiphenomenal to these computations. Thus, I can see that consciousness is just the first-person view of certain kinds of computations - as Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it, " How An Algorithm Feels From Inside". I also know, from neuroscience combined with Occam's razor, that my consciousness consists only of material operations in my brain - probably mostly patterns of neuronal firing that help process inputs, compute intermediate ideas, and produce behavioral outputs. Seeing consciousness from a third-person perspective Other person: Hmm, well, I think I would know I'm conscious because I behave more intelligently than an insect and can describe my inner life.īrian: Can you explain what about your brain gives rise to consciousness that's not present in an insect?īrian: If you don't understand why you're conscious, how can you be so sure an insect isn't conscious? There's no inner experience.īrian: If you didn't know from your own subjective experience that you were conscious, would you predict that you were conscious, or would you see yourself as executing a bunch of responses "in the dark" as the behaviorists might have seen you? How could a little thing executing simple response behaviors be conscious? It's just reacting in an automatic, reflexive way. Other person: Well, it just seems absurd. Sometimes I have conversations like this:īrian: Do you think insects are conscious? If that's not obvious, and especially if that seems implausible or impossible, then our way of thinking about consciousness is fundamentally flawed, because this neural collective is in fact conscious. We need a conception of consciousness which makes it seem obvious that this collection of observable cognitive operations is conscious. Nothing would be hidden exclusively to your subjective experience everything would have a physical, observable correlate in the neural data. Every thought and feeling would have a signature in this neural collective. Given all this knowledge, we could trace every aspect of your consciousness. We have high-level intuitions for thinking about what the functions of various neural operations are, in a similar way as a programmer understands the "gist" of what a complex algorithm is doing. We understand how brain networks interact to produce complex patterns. We understand how every neuron in the brain is hooked up, how it fires, and what electrical and chemical factors modulate it. Imagine we have perfect neuroscience knowledge. Given perfect neuroscience, where is consciousness? ![]() If our conceptualization of consciousness can't even predict our own consciousness, it must be misguided in an important way. Very likely he would conclude that this machine was not conscious it would seem to be just an automaton computing behavioral choices "in the dark". Suppose I grabbed a man on the street and described every detail of what your brain is doing at a physical level - including neuronal firings, evoked potentials, brain waves, thalamocortical loops, and all the rest - but without using suggestive words like "vision" or "awareness" or "feeling". We can tell there's something wrong with our ordinary conceptions when we think about ourselves. Many "theories of consciousness" that scientists advance and even the language we use set us up for a binary notion of consciousness as being one discrete thing that's either on or off. Susan Blackmore believes the way we typically think about consciousness is fundamentally wrong. "don't hold strong opinions about things you don't understand" - Derek Hess Personal spirituality does not imply universal joy. ![]() Not clear if the environment wants to be preserved or changed
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