Consciousness: Where Are Words?
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https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Riccardo_Manzotti/publi...
I think, consciousness from how our brains learn, namely by having internalized the feedback. Which is another way of saying by modeling the world, and updating those models by constantly monitoring the effectiveness of those models.
We are self-observers, integrating our sensory information into a subjective first-person perspective.
This is obviously false to me.*
If a robot vacuum recognizes a roadblock and stops, its inner representation of the roadblock is not merely an agreement (with whom anyway?).
That representation is internal and (normally) only accessible to the software of that particular robot (it may even could change over time - of course it would be a bad programming practice except for malwares - so no agreement is needed but only some kind of behavioral self consistency). And it have real causal power: it makes the robot stop and turn.
That representation is stored in memory cells wich are (usually in a normal household) not roadblocks.
*(AFAIK this viewpoint is called functionalism. It just somehow feels natural to me as a developer, but maybe it is just taste, and it is just as twisted for a philosopher as the above identity theory for me...)
"ALL PROPOUNDERS of theories of knowledge since Kant have been influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the mistaken way he formulated the problem of knowledge. As a result of his “a priorism” he advanced the view that all objects given to us are our representations..."
"When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to exert an effect in the present, in various combinations."
It's kind of like saying that when you dive down to the network layer, video doesn't exist. It's up to the application running the network to assemble all the packets to turn it into video.
Thoughts are constructed from the stream of physical experiences that get formed into words, not the other way around. It's perfectly possible for the brain to still operate without thoughts the way we experience them, in fact, deaf people think visually rather than auditorially like most of us do.
You can think visually and procedurally (imagining actions) without putting things into words. IIRC Broca's area (which is responsible for grammar) may be related to the temporal planning of non-verbal actions though, so the above may be limited to Wernike's aphasia.
I have had a very hard time explaining to people that I just think thoughts, like flashes of... thinking, without words or actions or images. It's like when speaking or typing, you already know what you're going to say or type or write before you put it into words, but some people have trouble relating to that.
I'm in the same boat, actually. While I can't read without vocalizing mentally, I have speechless thoughts especially when it comes to math/logic stuff, and I sometimes find it painful to have to wait for my mouth to serialize what I have in mind.
We are steering our evolution as a species outside of biology, in large part, via social and cultural institutions. What other species does that?
None. Sometimes I wonder if they know something we don't.
We know this is wrong though. Memory of a chair is distinct from memory of the word "chair". If this wasn't true, then it would be difficult or impossible to speak multiple languages fluently. Also, animals wouldn't be able to understand the world around them, because they don't have language like we have language.
I do take it seriously - it's utterly fascinating. I'm really excited to read Manzotti's new book.
What is consciousness?
What is existence?
They seem to be duals of each other.
I have found that, if you are careful to state the subject and object of a sentence, then it's really hard to pose any question that doesn't have a trivial and obvious answer.
TRY IT!
So could many of these things just be an artifact of language?
Humans are certainly self conscious. Crabs are certainly conscious. Crystals certainly exist.
Where the boundaries are is an interesting question, but the categories certainly exist even if I can't draw a clean boundary around members.
What it is like? So you are comparing one entity experiencing something to another. Experiencing is a process that takes place inside the entity and among its component parts.
Know you are that thing - every thing is itself, if it has well defined boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and good reasons to believe it to be correct. Here we have a tautology - that a thing is itself - so it doesn't require much to know that. What you are probably more interested in is a mechanism that can take advantge of that knowledge in various ways. Like self preservation.
Humans are self conscious.
Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them.
Crystals do not have this knowledge or do not have a mechanism to act on it in a way that manipulates semantic symbols.
It's a bit more complicated. Self consciousness is the ability to contemplate mental states, some philosophers say. Crabs do not contemplate their own mental states, they simply act and feel.
So define the word contemplate.
But do you see how defining things and using the subject and object makes it hard to ask any of the major questions?
Sorry, but it was my first comment on the thread. You are confusing me with the guy that posted earlier. I apologize for entering in the middle of your conversation.
> So define the word contemplate.
Contemplate: to observe something and to entertain thoughts about it.
Imply that self preservation is an example of self consciousness is not sufficient for me. Plants too react to stimuli and they don't even have a nervous system (edit: neurons are not a sine qua non condition, obviously. I was only pointing to the fact that simpler organisms react to the environment, it is one of the most basic evolutionary strategies). It is necessary something more.
As the poster before me said, there are boundaries. They can be not clear, but they exist.
According to this definition, crabs are self conscious.
I guess my office building is self conscious then, as it has a sprinkler system.
"Know you are that thing - every thing is itself, if it has well defined boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and good reasons to believe it to be correct. Here we have a tautology - that a thing is itself - so it doesn't require much to know that. What you are probably more interested in is a mechanism that can take advantge of that knowledge in various ways. Like self preservation."
This line of thought leads to the self-consciousness of buildings in exactly the same way as it leads to the self-consciousness of crabs.
Anyway my original point stands :)
'Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them.'
I pointed out that this works equally well for the claim that buildings with sprinkler systems are self-conscious, a conclusion that you have tacitly agreed is ridiculous. There's no difficulty in seeing what flaw in reasoning led to this conclusion: it is in the claim '[self preservation] requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them', where, in fact, all it needs is a suitable response to a stimulus that may signal an existential threat. This claim is not in jjaredsimpson's definition of self-consciousness; it is an independent axiom that you inserted into the discussion.
If your original point is that any discussion can be stalled by the injection of bogus arguments over the definitions of words, then I would have to agree that you have proven it by example.