Yes, by "consciousness" I normally mean phenomenal consciousness. All compwareness has awareness, and, thus, has some of the properties of consciousness, and could be called a type of consciousness. But normally when I use the word I am referring to special compwareness, created by the special computation in the brain, which has the properties of what we call phenomenal consciousness.
*How would human's behave differently if they did not have phenominal consciousness? * The awareness of compwareness is inherent in, and required for, all computation in reality. So, without the awareness of compwareness there can be no computation of physics, or of the mind, and thus no human behavior. But my theory hypothesizes that phenomenal conscious is a very special form of compwareness that is inherent in certain brain computations, but not all brain computation. For example we often have little or no consciousness of much of the computation involved in natural language understanding or generation. It is my belief that we are most consciously aware of that of which relatively large portions of our brain have compwareness of. In our brains such large scale awareness has a functional role, such as creating a widespread awareness of partial information about which there is to be a massively parallel search, or crating a widespread awareness of a set of objects in our visual field on which our brain is to do a massively parallel search to determine their meaning or implication. So, I believe that in our brains, at least, consciousness has a functional purpose, that is, to create sufficiently widespread awareness of something in the brain so to set up a massively parallel search for it, or to create a massively parallel awareness of the meaning (i.e., associations) of that something. So in our brains, I think a loss of consciousness would cause a loss of many important computational behaviors -- something for which their is substantial experiential evidence. (That is, when people are unconscious, their behavioral abilities are substantially reduced.) However, I cannot yet rule out the possibility that artificial brains with a different computational architecture might be able to perform many of the computations that required phenominally conscious compwareness in our brains, without such consciousness in theirs. *How can you test if a person has phenominal consciousness?* As I said in my original post on the Compwareness Theory, consciousness is subjective because of internal bandwidth and P.O.V. issues. Thus, actually experiencing someones consciousness is currently (and perhaps forever) impossible. But the medical community has developed tests that are believed to be able to determine if someone is conscious based on the causal unification of the computation in their brain. This fits with the discussion in my initial post on how compwareness can have the unities we subjectively sense in phenomenal consciousness. On Wednesday, June 10, 2015, Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 2:47 PM, Kyle Kidd <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Where is Matt Mahoney to thoroughly debunk all of this? > > Sorry, I was behind on my email. > > > On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 7:58 PM, EdFromNH . <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > >> THE COMPWARENESS THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: > >> > >> HOW OUR BRAINS COMPUTE OUR SOULS: > > Could you explain what you mean by "consciousness"? I assume you mean > phenomenal consciousness or qualia, as opposed to the mental state of > wakefulness, the opposite of unconsciousness. > > Specifically, how would humans behave differently if we lacked qualia? > How do you test whether a person has qualia or is a philosophical > zombie? I mean, you can't just ask them because a zombie would claim > to be conscious. > > -- > -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] > > > ------------------------------------------- > AGI > Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now > RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/8630185-a57a74e1 > Modify Your Subscription: > https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com > ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
