Corey Hammer

Consciousness may serve a purpose, but first...

Most human processing goes on below the threshold of consciousness. E.g., Do you know how you read? Probably not, and any description you give would likely be wrong (Nisbett & Ross, 1978?).

However, consciousness most likely serves as a moment-by-moment goals evaluator (see Fiske and Taylor, 1990, Chapter 8?).

The question marks are because I don't have my books with me at work.

excreationist

I agree... I think that we are only explicitly aware of maybe a few hundred or thousand variables at a time (shape data, colour data, goals, etc) and "we" are the central goals evaluator. We therefore have to process a summary of relevant information. The other parts of our brains compile the summaries and give advice and work out the "weightings" of the possibilities (the intensity of associated "pleasures" and "pains") - and the goal evaluator automatically selects the option with the maximum pleasure and/or minimum pain.

Jesse

There's a lot of confusion over the term "consciousness"...are people talking about the functional aspects of consciousness here, the things that being conscious allows an organism to do? Or are they talking about the first-person aspects of consciousness, "qualia" like the experience of seeing the color orange? My view is that neuroscience will probably be able to explain the first (and that we'll eventually be able to create artificial intelligences that pass the Turing test) but that the second aspect will always be philosophical territory, not really "explainable" by science.

excreationist

Well my model is a philosophical framework where I can imagine what programmed, aware or conscious systems would sense. My framework isn't about what these systems *can* do, it is what they *must* do to be considered consciousness or aware, within my framework.
Note that non-conscious aware systems such as mice would sense orange as part of their total immediate experience but they can't analyse this experience using a meta-language. (Like philosophers can)
So I'm saying qualia is just people's idiosyncratic ways of experiencing the world - the summaries of the shape and colour data, pleasure and pain signals, etc, which they use to make deterministic high-level decisions. They are idiosyncratic because we built up our associations between elements of experience in our own unique ways - we weren't preprogrammed.
But even though the data is different, it is fairly equivalent in the same way that orange can be represented on computers in many different formats but within a particular system, it is orange.
So there is qualia - it is data within a system, that carries meaning for that system based on its purpose.

ksagnostic

If I understand the definition you are using, I can't really buy your description of what is necessary for consciousness, because it is far too language dependent. According to your definition, people with substantial language disabilities would not be conscious. Having worked with quite a number of these people for a living, I can guarantee you that they are quite aware of their goals, other people's goals, and also evaluate experiences. In other words, they express their understanding of metacoginitive abilities in terms of thinking about their thoughts or those of others, but do not necessarily demonstrate the ability to do so using language dependent modes (e.g., speech, writing, signing, graphic symbols), or do so in a highly telegraphic, abbrieviated manner.

An informative book for you to read might be THINKING IN PICTURES by Temple Grandin.

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679772898/qid=1014176890/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_3_1/102-9528424-3138547" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679772898/qid=1014176890/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_3_1/102-9528424-3138547</a>

ksagnostic

Ex-Creationist: Animals might be able to see that the image "represents" their self, but for them to be really intelligent they have to understand that the mirror is like a camera pointing towards their body. A good experiments would be to make them look in the mirror, then wave some food behind their head. If the animal (or baby or toddler) turns around trying to find the food then they understand how mirrors work. Another thing to do could be to put a hat on them and let them look at it in the mirror, then later put some food in it and see if they try and get the food out... (something like that).

Me: Are you aware that research in this area has gone well beyond what you are describing? The basic mirror test is known as the "Gallup Test", and was first done with chimpanzees, who not only recognized themselves in mirrors, but used the mirrors to find where they had been tagged with red dye, and also to examine parts of their bodies they otherwise could not see. Orangutans have also passed the Gallup Test (I actually witnessed some of this research). I have read reports of bottlenose dolphins and elephants also passing the Gallup Test.

However, research with chimpanzees has gone well beyond the basics of the Gallup Test. Chimpanzees have also demonstrated the ability to use live video images of themselves to examine themselves, and also to find things that they could reach but not see. A chimpanzee also was able to use a miniature replica of a room to find a hidden coke can in the actual room (the tester would "hide" a miniature Coke Can somewhere in the miniature room, then the chimp would go and find it).

excreationist

ksagnostic:
Thanks for that info about mirrors and apes...

Anyway about consciousness:
I can't get a hold of that book in the near future... but anyway, do these people wonder where everything came from and what happens after they die, etc?

That's what I mean by consciousness really. That definition is only in its early stages...
maybe I will call it something like
"self-motivated philosophical consciousness".

This is the kind of consciousness that sci-fi authors write about when the computer or robot is wondering about their own existence and how they could use their life in the best way, and about their death, etc.

Happy Wonderer

I've never been a great fan of the Turing test concept, which is essentially that a computer can fool a human into thinking that a human is at the other end of the "teletype." It is easy to make that work if you limit the questioner's assumptions suitably -- the famous "Eliza" computer program (by Donald Knuth) can be seen as a counter-example of the Turing test. The program was very simple, rephrasing the questioner's last statement as a question to simulate a "psychiatrist".

Humans look for intelligence and patterns, and in my opinion are easy to fool. I sometimes think some of the trolls I have read here are really AI programs. An AI 'fundie' would probably be convincing since we expect them to have a pretty limited reprotire.

I think it would be easy to build someting that given an appropriate posting would emit a combination of "but that is just a VARIATION, no new KINDS were created", "this is just as much evidence of a common designer", "because of SIN" and "they aren't published because there is a gigantic conspiracy to suppress their views" that would do the trick. Add a few randomly-generated Bible quotes and you have it made...

HW

(Note that I'm satiring our conception of a creationist, no offense to any actual creationists...)

Happy Wonderer

In addition, the Eliza-Fundy program would search for any quote with the word "theory" or "suggests" and reply with "so it is just a THEORY, then?"

We know we have succeeded if we can get QoS to slaughter it!

HW

[ February 19, 2002: Message edited by: Happy Wonderer ]</p>

ksagnostic

I agree that science fiction writers (and for that matter philosophers, theologians, some cognitive scientists, etc.) write about the expression of deep thoughts as evidence of consciousness, however, I think it's kind of a cart before the horse thinking to define such thoughts as what is defined as consciousness. The philosophical level of thought you are discussing can be ultimately described as an expression of curiousity, which except for the depth of subject matter would be IMO difficult to qualitatively distinguish from other expressions of curiousity (e.g., "Why is he doing that?", "Where's my Mom?", or "Where did you get that football card?"). The difference appears to me to be more one of quantity.

Certainly, language is helpful for formulating "self motivated philosophical consciousness" thoughts, but is it necessary? It doesn't seem to me that it would be. Being quite language delayed myself as a child, I think I remember looking up at the clouds and wondering what was up there without the words to do so (I didn't start to talk much beyond single words until ages 3 and 4, which is developmentally quite late, but my onset of autobiographical memory does not seem to have been similarly delayed, in that I have memories dating from ages 3 and 4). Of course, childhood memory is imperfect at best, and I realize that I am offering weak anecdotal evidence here. Certainly, language would be very important for the fine tuning of deep thoughts, and usually for the expression of them to others.

[ February 19, 2002: Message edited by: ksagnostic ]</p>