No no no no no no no!!!!!!!!!!!! js1138!!! State-dependent learning is not at all the sort of thing I intended here. We aren't even up the the problem of learning here yet; we are at the point of trying to elucidate what consciousness, mental activity is, and what responsibility the brain has in this activity. You give it 100% responsibility -- which leaves YOU (and me) neatly out of the process.
What I was referring to is a process that is so intimate, and yet so pervasive, that we tend not to notice it at all.
What I mean is: What is required in order to execute a "mental operation," a thought? What is needed? how do we get it? and from whence do we get it?
These statements probably sound completely intelligible on first hearing. So let me propose a thought experiment (literally!) that might help clarify what I'm driving at.
There is only one requirement: You [editorial "you" here, js1138 -- I'm not trying "to turn up the heat" on you] are to think about your own thinking. That is, you must try to "analyze" your own thought process, to break it down into steps. You might, for instance, ask yourself a question whose answer you do not know, and then see what you do next. Then you might find yourself qualifying, collecting, and assembling potential sources or "evidence" that seem relevant to the solution of the problem. Then you might probably notice that you begin to compare things, one with another. Along the way, you may find you have been executing the entire process, not in a "linear" way, but in a wholistic way -- because you're drawing so many different threads together, qualifying them, relating them, and so forth, so to draw a conclusion.
Alternatively, you could just ask yourself, "What do I want for lunch today?" Just study what happens next, pay really close attention to it.
i think if you were to do this experiment, you might find that you have a valid, actual basis for suspecting that the brain is, in all probability, not the party "responsible" for this process; though it is clear it has a facilitating role to play.
Darn right. Gotta give that Ghost in the Machine its due.
There is only one requirement: You [editorial "you" here, js1138 -- I'm not trying "to turn up the heat" on you] are to think about your own thinking. That is, you must try to "analyze" your own thought process, to break it down into steps.
BB, the simple command 'top' tells a computer running Unix to show a periodically updated list of current processes. When you run top, one of the processes it shows you is 'top'. It reckons for you the time and memory it's using to run itself. If you cared, you could put 'top' in a script that would look at top looking at top looking at top. And I take it you're not going to claim my servers have souls.
Recursive operations aren't that problematic, and they don't prove much. Thinking about yourself thinking just gives you several trips through your own navel; it doesn't reveal anything.
You may not believe this, but I do this very frequently. You may believe it even less when I tell you that I came to a conclusion that may well be the opposite of yours. Often I ask myself, "how did I come to do that in this specific way", or, "how did my train of thought reach this particular point?" More often than not, I come to the conclusion that I could hardly have done otherwise!
Here's a case in point. Last year I was reading Erasmus's discourse on Free Will, and I challenged myself to demonstrate that I truly had Free Will. My demonstration (unwitnessed) was to take off my shoe and put it on my head. I then deconstructed the action: why did I do that?
Well, the action had to be unusual. I could have raised my hand, or whistled a tune, or removed my glasses, but these are things I might have some other, less volitional motivation for doing. The action had to be something dramatic, so that I would remember it. It preferentially would involve some item close at hand (my will is ostensibly free, but it is above all lazy). What items are closer at hand than my clothing? I could have removed my shirt, but that would have been more difficult and less comfortable. (Never mind the pants.) So a shoe was certainly the most obvious candidate. But removing a shoe, while a volitional act, is something I might have done anyway; some odd gesture is required. What unusual, arresting thing can I do with a shoe? Several things, sure, but placing it on my head was easy and immediate.
So, all things considered, my demonstration fell flat. My path to a proof of Free Will was strictly a path of least resistance, obvious in retrospect at every step. Do I have Free Will? I sincerely believe that I do...but in all honesty, at that particular moment, I as sincerely believe that I did not obviously employ it.
I hope you realize that neither you, nor I, nor anyone else in the near future is going to solve this problem.
What I have to offer are images and analogies. One of my favorite ways of thinking about consciousness is to consider dreams. Are we conscious during dreams? Silly question????
I don't know about you, but in the moments of awakening after a vivid dream, I have the impression I have been conscious. Often I have the impression that I have seen things that I could not possibly have ever seen in real life. Sometimes I have been flying, Peter Pan style. Other times I have been in houses that are similar to my childhood house, but impossibly large, and having rooms that don't exist.
Dreaming is an activity of the brain. All mammals dream. You can watch people and animals dream. You can record their brain waves and tell whether the focus of the dream is vision or movement.
Dreaming, if you assume the world is objectively real, is pure mental experience, unattached to the real world. But it is not unattached to the brain. The brain is doing what it usually does, but with sensory inputs shut down. It is, in a sense conscious and self-aware.
Now I am going to assert that people, more so than other animals, have the ability to dream while awake. We call it imagination. We can have multiple experiences simultaneously. We can respond to decision making situations by imagining multiple outcomes.
The ability to have multiple selves appears to be a defining trait of humans. I personally think some animals have this ability, but limited to the next second or two in time. We have language and culture, which expands the reach of our imagination.
But note that people differ greatly in their abilities, and under stress, our ability to imagine alternatives narrows.
Human freedom is an act of imagination. Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage -- because, at least some of us, can imagine and dream while awake.
I do not see any particular problem with having multiple instances of awareness or consciousness. It's a mystery, but it doesn't require the assumption that our brains have some magic that is totally missing from animal brains.
I think we have been mislead by a couple of bad analogies. For centuries, humans were distinguished from animals by their ability to reason. I happen to think reason is overrated. It is the easiest of all human activities to simulate with computers. In fact we are already obsolete in the arena of reason.
The computer as it is currently constructed, is a lousy analogy for the brain. Brains are not sequential in any sense that is analogous to what happens in a computer program. Brains do not have CPUs that are separate from memory. Brains correlate sensory inputs and responses "instantly". Well not instantly, but not in a linear, logical mode either. Anyone who argues has had the experience of saying something before knowing what he or she is going to say. Athletes do things without thinking. Brains are built first of all, to do. And do it quickly.
When we are thinking, we are doing in our imagination. Multiple instances of our dream selves are living out scenerios of past and future possibilities. It's quite a trick, but it is not qualitatively different from what animals do.
Freeper tortoise has assurred us that AI researches have a handle on what needs to be done to simulate this in silicon, but adds the stipulation that we can't build the hardware yet. I bet.