Harry Chesley wrote:
Richard Loosemore wrote:
Harry Chesley wrote:
Richard Loosemore wrote:
I completed the first draft of a technical paper on consciousness
the other day. It is intended for the AGI-09 conference, and it
can be found at:
http://susaro.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/draft_consciousness_rpwl.pdf
One other point: Although this is a possible explanation for our
subjective experience of qualia like "red" or "soft," I don't see
it explaining "pain" or "happy" quite so easily. You can
hypothesize a sort of mechanism-level explanation of those by
relegating them to the older or "lower" parts of the brain (i.e.,
they're atomic at the conscious level, but have more effects at the
physiological level (like releasing chemicals into the system)),
but that doesn't satisfactorily cover the subjective side for me.
I do have a quick answer to that one.
Remember that the core of the model is the *scope* of the analysis
mechanism. If there is a sharp boundary (as well there might be),
then this defines the point where the qualia kick in. Pain receptors
are fairly easy: they are primitive signal lines. Emotions are, I
believe, caused by clusters of lower brain structures, so the
interface between "lower brain" and "foreground" is the place where
the foreground sees a limit to the analysis mechanisms.
More generally, the significance of the "foreground" is that it sets
a boundary on how far the analysis mechanisms can reach.
I am not sure why that would seem less satisfactory as an explanation
of the subjectivity. It is a "raw feel", and that is the key idea,
no?
My problem is if qualia are atomic, with no differentiable details, why
do some "feel" different than others -- shouldn't they all be separate
but equal? "Red" is relatively neutral, while "searing hot" is not. Part
of that is certainly lower brain function, below the level of
consciousness, but that doesn't explain to me why it "feels"
qualitatively different. If it was just something like increased
activity (franticness) in response to "searing hot," then fine, that
could just be something like adrenaline being pumped into the system,
but there is a subjective feeling that goes beyond that.
There is more than one question wrapped up inside this question, I think.
First: all qualia feel "different", of course. You seem to be pointing
to a sense in which pain is "more different than most" .... ? But is
that really a valid idea?
Does pain have "differentiable details"? Well, there are different
types of pain .... but that is to be expected, like different colors.
But that is arelatively trivial point. Within one single pain there can
be several *effects* of that pain, including some strange ones that do
not have counterparts in the vision-color case.
For example, suppose that a "searing hot" pain caused a simultaneous
triggering of the motivational system, forcing you to suddenly want to
do something (like pulling your body part away from the pain). The
feeling of "wanting" (wanting to pull away) is a quale of its own, in a
sense, so it would not be impossible for one quale (searing hot) to
always be associated with another (wanting to pull away). If those
always occurred together, it might seem that there was structure to the
pain experience, where in fact there is a pair of things happening.
It is probably more than a pair of things, but perhaps you get my drift.
Remember that having associations to a pain is not part of what we
consider to be the essence of the subjective experience; the bit that
is most mysterious and needs to be explained.
Another thing we have to keep in mind here is that the exact details of
how each subjective experience feels are certainly going to seem
different, and some can seem like each other and not like others ....
colors are like other colors, but not like pains.
That is to be expected: we can say that colors happen in a certain
place in our sensorium (vision) while pains are associated with the body
(usually), but these differences are not inconsistent with the account I
have given. If concept-atoms encoding [red] always attach to all the
othe concept-atoms involving visual experiences, that would make them
very different than pains like [searing hot], but all of this could be
true at the same time that [red] would do what it does to the analysis
mechanism (when we try to think the thought "Was is the essence of
redness?"). So the problem with the analysis mechanism would happen
with both pains and colors, even though the two different atom types
played games with different sets of other concept-atoms.
Richard Loosemore
-------------------------------------------
agi
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