Eric: I claim that it is the very fact that you are making decisions about
whether to supress pain for higher goals that is the reason you are
conscious of pain. Your consciousness is the computation of a
top-level decision making module (or perhaps system). If you were not
making decisions waying (nuanced) pain against higher goals,
you would not be conscious of the pain.
Sure, emotions are designed to pressure the conscious self. But that whole
setup makes no sense at all, if the conscious self is merely the execution
of a deterministic program. It's a) unnecessary - deterministically
programmed computers work perfectly well without having a conscious,
executive self, and b) it's sadistic in the extreme, torturing and punishing
a self which has supposedly gotta do what it's gotta do anyway. It's quite
bizarre in fact.
Hence Fodor:
It's been increasingly clear, since Freud, that psychological processes of
great complexity can be unconscious. The question then arises: what does
consciousness add to what unconsciousness can achieve? To put it another
way, what mental processes are there that can be performed only because the
mind is conscious, and what does consciousness contribute to their
performance? Nobody has an answer to this question for any mental process
whatever. As far as anybody knows, anything that our conscious minds do,
they could do just as well if they were unconscious. Why then did God bother
to make consciousness. What on earth could he have had in mind?
Jerry Fodor, article, You can't argue with a novel, London Review of Books,
4.3.2004
On the other hand, if the self is nondeterministically programmed, then
everything makes sense. Then the system needs to pressure a continually
wayward self, that keeps getting carried away on particular tasks ,
reminding it with emotions of the other goals and tasks it's ignoring. Back
to work. Back to sleep. Or back to sex.
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