>> 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:
Ben> Hi Richard, Ben> I don't have any comments yet about what you have written, Ben> because I'm not sure I fully understand what you're trying to Ben> say... I hope your answers to these questions will help clarify Ben> things. Ben> It seems to me that your core argument goes something like this: Ben> That there are many concepts for which an introspective analysis Ben> can only return the concept itself. That this recursion blocks Ben> any possible explanation. That consciousness is one of these Ben> concepts because "self" is inherently recursive. Therefore, Ben> consciousness is explicitly blocked from having any kind of Ben> explanation. Haven't read the paper yet, but the situation with introspection is the following: Introspection accesses a meaning level, at which you can summon and use concepts (subroutines) by name, but you are protected essentially by information hiding from looking at the code that implements them. Consider for example summoning Microsoft Word to perform some task. You know what you are doing, why you are doing it, how you intend to use it, but you have no idea of the code within Microsoft Word. The same is true for internal concepts within your mind. Your mind is no more built to be able to look inside subroutines, than my laptop is built to output the internal transistor values. Partial results within subroutines are not meaningful, your conscious processing is in terms of meaningful quantities. What is Thought? (MIT Press, 2004) discusses this, in Chap 14 which answers most questions about consciousness IMO. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
