Is Conciousness necessary?
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Sijin wrote: Is Conciousness necessary? Not if what I'm seeing from some people lately is any indication. (yeah - grumpy Chris this morning) cheers, Chris Maunder
Chris Maunder wrote: Not if what I'm seeing from some people lately is any indication. Hmmm. Maybe I should send you all those old baseball bats I'm not using anymore. They're a little cracked & splintered, but I think you can still get a good whack or two out of them... Christopher Duncan Today's Corporate Battle Tactic Unite the Tribes: Ending Turf Wars for Career and Business Success The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World
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Hey Stan, always great to hear your views on this subject. Stan Shannon wrote: But to answer your question, is consciousness necessary? The answer is: "No, it isn't." The fact that we have intelligent machines diligently following the instructions we place in them, yet having done nothing to render them conscious, is proof of that. What i was asking is if a human being is born without any input senses, would he become concious of 'self'? Stan Shannon wrote: I think evolution has built the brain around conciousness not vice versa I don't quite follow that one :confused: Stan Shannon wrote: To assume that consciousness explodes out of a machine once it has acheived a certain arbitrary level of information processing ability is one of the most absurd fallicies of our time. It is like the dark age notion of believing that life (or at least mice) is spontaniously generated out of piles of dirty clothing. Not information processing ability, but rather just information. So what i wam saying is that people with no memory at all, neither short-term or long-term would not be self-aware. What do you think?
I always think that the idea of a compiler that compiles another compiler or itself is rather incestuous in a binary way. - Colin Davies My .Net Blog
Sijin wrote: What i was asking is if a human being is born without any input senses, would he become concious of 'self'? I think the more appropriate way to ask the question is: Is it possible to be aware of nothing except 'self'? (or at the very least to be conscious of nothing but being conscious). I see no reason why it shouldn't be possible, although what would your concept of 'self' be if you had nothing external to 'self' to compare it to? Sijin wrote: I don't quite follow that one I don't understand what consciousness is. But I also simply do not understand how something that is non-conscious can give rise to something that is. How could you so arrange non-concious matter so that consciousness could somehow explode out of it? The entire notion seems ludicrous to me. I think it is much more likely that the brain is an organ that has evolved around the existence of consciousness in exactly the same way that the eye has evolved around the existence of light. That is, whatever it is that we are experience as consciousness is, in fact, a fundamental property of the universe. Our brains are not generating it, they are focusing it and giving it content. Sijin wrote: So what i wam saying is that people with no memory at all, neither short-term or long-term would not be self-aware. What do you think? Well I think you're correct, memory would be essential for developing self identity. That presents an interesting point. To make significant use of consciouness you do in fact need an information storage mechanism of some kind. I sort of wonder if we are actually ever trully conscious of the present moment, perhaps we don't become conscious of an event until immediately after it has been stored in memory, part of the past, and not while it is actually happening. The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism, but under then name of Liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program until one day America will be a Socialist nation without knowing how it happened. - Norman Thomas, Socialist Party Presidential candidate