On Friday, June 18, 2021 at 8:46:39 PM UTC+2 Jason wrote: > In your opinion who has offered the best theory of consciousness to date, > or who do you agree with most? Would you say you agree with them > wholeheartedly or do you find points if disagreement? > > I am seeing several related thoughts commonly expressed, but not sure > which one or which combination is right. For example: > > Hofstadter/Marchal: self-reference is key >
I don't know if self-reference in the sense of Godel sentences is relevant to consciousness but I would say that self-reference in the sense of intrinsic identity of an object explains qualitative properties of consciousness (qualia). I imagine that every object has two kinds of identity: intrinsic identity (something that the object is in itself) and extrinsic identity (relations of the object to all other objects). Intrinsic identity is something qualitative (non-relational), a quality that stands in relations to other qualities, so it seems like a natural candidate for the qualitative properties of consciousness. All relations are instances of the similarity relation (similarities between qualities arising from common and different properties of the qualities), of which a particular kind of relation deserves a special mention: the composition relation, also known as the set membership relation in set theory, or the relation between a whole and its part (or between a combination of objects and an object in the combination), which gives rise to a special kind of relational identity of an object: the compositional identity, which is constituted by the relations of the object to its parts (in other words, it is the internal structure of the object - not to be confused with the intrinsic identity of the object, which is a non-structural quality!). Set theory describes the compositional identity of all possible composite objects down to non-composite objects (instances of the empty set). Since all objects have an intrinsic identity, this is a panpsychist view but it seems important to differentiate between different levels or intensities of consciousness. > Tononi/Tegmark: information is key > Study of neural correlates of consciousness suggests that the level or intensity of consciousness of an object depends on the complexity of the object's structure. There are two basic approaches to the definition of complexity: "disorganized" complexity (which is high in objects that have many different and independent (random) parts) and "organized" complexity (which is high in objects that have many different but also dependent (integrated) parts). It is the organized complexity in a dynamic form that seems important for the level of consciousness. Tononi's integrated information theory is based on such organized complexity though I don't know if his particular specification of the complexity is correct. > Dennett/Chalmers: function is key > >From the evolutionary perspective it seems important for an organism to be able to create internal representations of external objects on different levels of composition of reality. Such representations reflect both the diversity and regularities of reality and need to be properly integrated to have a unified, coordinated influence on the organism's behavior. So the organized complexity of the organism's representations seems to be related to its functionality. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/cdb10702-4479-4089-b0c0-2d145de35efdn%40googlegroups.com.
