X-Message-Number: 7980 Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 20:57:53 -0800 From: Tim Freeman <> Subject: The hard problem of consciousness From: Joseph Strout <> >The "hard problem" of consciousness is: how is it that ANY system of >physical stuff can have any awareness at all? Whence comes >"consciousness"? Can you imagine (as some believe they can) a great >superbrain more intelligent and adaptive than ourselves, which yet >experiences nothing? If so, why do WE have conscious experience? If not, >why is it that such a brain must be conscious? Beware that this "hard problem" is not an attempt to explain an empirical observation that has actually been made. In the absence of experiments that can distinguish conscious entities from non-conscious entities, all we know is that many individual humans believe they are conscious. So the hard problem devolves to: How is it that any system of physical stuff can argue persuasively that it is conscious? What is the source of the belief by many individual humans that they are conscious? Could a hypothetical great superbrain not share this belief and still do anything interesting? If so, why do some of us believe themselves to be conscious? If not, then how would lacking that belief hinder its capacities? I see two parts to anything I'm willing to call "consciousness". Both are something the hypothetical superbrain would have to have, and neither is anything more than a property of an ongoing computation that is controlling some device that is interacting with the rest of the world: When I make plans, there is this unique entity in the plan I call "me" that is different from all of the other entities in the plan. "My" behavior is chosen as part of the plan-making process, but all of the other entities participating in the plan do not have behaviors that are chosen as part of the plan-making process. This special property of "me" is the nearest thing to "free will" that I understand, and the fact that there is only one of them in the plan is the "transcendant ego". If I'm making a plan that will guide the behavior of a group of people, or of me and my car on the way to work, the "I" in the plan may be a group or may include a car. When I bang on my finger with a hammer, it hurts. This is "qualia". When I'm driving my car and I notice that it starts to malfunction, there is a similar cognitive phenomenon, although unlike the pain of the banged finger this one is learned rather than instinctive. The point is that the computational device is actually processing the inputs received by the device that is interacting with the rest of the world, and some of those inputs impact the validity of the plans that are being considered. I encountered this notion of consciousness at http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/volume2-1/psyche-95-2-17-shadows-9-mcdermott.html, section 9.3, and I like it a lot. No mysteries. -- Tim Freeman http://www.infoscreen.com/resume.html Web-centered Java and Perl programming in Silicon Valley or offsite Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7980