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