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Consciousness: Where Are Words?

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Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?

#31

Post by smaddox »

vinceguidry wrote: post #4
empath75 wrote: post #3

I'm 3 sentences into the interview, and this seems absurd on its face. Does anyone take this seriously? "When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to exer…

I had the same reaction, but you have to keep reading. He's building a stack. He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory representations of them. There's no reason to start constructing the abstract objects yet, we're not at that layer of the 'st…

> He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory representations of them.

We know this is wrong though. Memory of a chair is distinct from memory of the word "chair". If this wasn't true, then it would be difficult or impossible to speak multiple languages fluently. Also, animals wouldn't be able to understand the world around them, because they don't have language like we have language.

Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?

#32

Post by szemet »

kaffeemitsahne wrote: post #9

Riccardo Manzotti's website: http://www.consciousness.it/

http://www.thespreadmind.com/The_Spread_Mind_S7.php

This is obviously false to me.*

If a robot vacuum recognizes a roadblock and stops, its inner representation of the roadblock is not merely an agreement (with whom anyway?).

That representation is internal and (normally) only accessible to the software of that particular robot (it may even could change over time - of course it would be a bad programming practice except for malwares - so no agreement is needed but only some kind of behavioral self consistency). And it have real causal power: it makes the robot stop and turn.

That representation is stored in memory cells wich are (usually in a normal household) not roadblocks.

*(AFAIK this viewpoint is called functionalism. It just somehow feels natural to me as a developer, but maybe it is just taste, and it is just as twisted for a philosopher as the above identity theory for me...)

Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?

#33

Post by dang »

empath75 wrote: post #3

I'm 3 sentences into the interview, and this seems absurd on its face. Does anyone take this seriously? "When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to exer…

Could you please not rush into an HN thread after 3 sentences to post a quick dismissal of somebody's work? This is just the sort of reaction we're trying to learn—as a community—to suspend, in order to have more substantive conversation. It takes effort, but it's worth it, since internet forums are a shallow wasteland otherwise.

Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?

#34

Post by [deleted] »

catawbasam wrote: post #23
kleer001 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think other living beings besides humans don't have thoughts? IMHO we're just a slightly souped up version of everything else, exist along a continuity, and are not 'special' except in contrived and technical ways.

'slightly' seems a bit understated to me. There is no other species whose members are anywhere close to sitting around typing messages to each other across hundreds or thousand of miles. We are steering our evolution as a species outside of biology, in large part, via social and cultural institutions. What other species does that?

[deleted]

Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?

#35

Post by EGreg »

guuz wrote: post #27
EGreg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's translate your sentences to illustrate what I mean. What it is like ? So you are comparing one entity experiencing something to another. Experiencing is a process that takes place inside the entity and among its component parts. Know you are that thing - every thing is itself, if it has well defined boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and good reasons to believe it to be corr…

> Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them. It's a bit more complicated. Self consciousness is the ability to contemplate mental states, some philosophers say. Crabs do not contemplate their own mental states, they simply act and feel.

Ok well there you go. I was basing it on your earlier definition.

So define the word contemplate.

But do you see how defining things and using the subject and object makes it hard to ask any of the major questions?

Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?

#36

Post by EGreg »

mannykannot wrote: post #30
EGreg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's translate your sentences to illustrate what I mean. What it is like ? So you are comparing one entity experiencing something to another. Experiencing is a process that takes place inside the entity and among its component parts. Know you are that thing - every thing is itself, if it has well defined boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and good reasons to believe it to be corr…

> Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them. I guess my office building is self conscious then, as it has a sprinkler system.

Please see sibling comment.

Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?

#37

Post by mannykannot »

EGreg wrote: post #36
mannykannot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them. I guess my office building is self conscious then, as it has a sprinkler system.

Please see sibling comment.

Please explain its relevance.

Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?

#39

Post by guuz »

EGreg wrote: post #35
guuz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them. It's a bit more complicated. Self consciousness is the ability to contemplate mental states, some philosophers say. Crabs do not contemplate their own mental states, they simply act and feel.

Ok well there you go. I was basing it on your earlier definition. So define the word contemplate . But do you see how defining things and using the subject and object makes it hard to ask any of the major questions?

> Ok well there you go. I was basing it on your earlier definition.

Sorry, but it was my first comment on the thread. You are confusing me with the guy that posted earlier. I apologize for entering in the middle of your conversation.

> So define the word contemplate.

Contemplate: to observe something and to entertain thoughts about it.

Imply that self preservation is an example of self consciousness is not sufficient for me. Plants too react to stimuli and they don't even have a nervous system (edit: neurons are not a sine qua non condition, obviously. I was only pointing to the fact that simpler organisms react to the environment, it is one of the most basic evolutionary strategies). It is necessary something more.

As the poster before me said, there are boundaries. They can be not clear, but they exist.

Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?

#40

Post by mannykannot »

EGreg wrote: post #38
mannykannot wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain its relevance.

Definitions matter. The guy updated his, to exclude your sprinkler example.

It seems, from the other thread, that there was no change in an original definition, but it would be moot anyway, as the sprinkler example follows the reasoning of your claim that a crab is self-conscious, which in turn follows from the confusion, over the difference between being a thing and knowing that one is that thing, in this paragraph:

"Know you are that thing - every thing is itself, if it has well defined boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and good reasons to believe it to be correct. Here we have a tautology - that a thing is itself - so it doesn't require much to know that. What you are probably more interested in is a mechanism that can take advantge of that knowledge in various ways. Like self preservation."

This line of thought leads to the self-consciousness of buildings in exactly the same way as it leads to the self-consciousness of crabs.

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