What many people call consciousness is qualia, that which distinguishes you from a philosophical zombie, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-zombie
There is no test for consciousness in this sense, but humans universally believe that they are conscious, and this belief is testable. Just ask someone. Do you really feel pain, or do you just behave as if you feel it? The belief in experiencing qualia is what I call recursive episodic memory. Episodic memory is the ability to recall a time sequence of events in the correct order. These events could include earlier acts of recall. For example, earlier today I recalled how yesterday a tune was playing in my head that I heard the day before (and so on). You probably do not remember any events that happened before you were 3 years old. You were clearly learning then, but it was not in episodic memory. A person without a hippocampus lacks episodic memory. He could learn new skills but wouldn't remember the lessons. Episodic memory has been demonstrated in birds, but we do not know if it is recursive. I don't know if recursive episodic memory is necessary for intelligence. When I need to come up with an algorithm when writing software, it is useful to go through the steps in my head and then be able to recall my thought process. It is also useful for databases to log read-only transactions. It is useful for computers to copy recently read data to cache. However, recursive episodic memory could also be an artifact of the brain's memory management system. Long term memory is written at a constant rate (about 2 bits per second, according to Landauer). During quiet times, it has to write something. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
