2 ms·

> His example merely demonstrated that if consciousness is a function of reality (and for the sake of his example he more or less explicitly makes the assumptio

> His example merely demonstrated that if consciousness is a function of reality (and for the sake of his example he more or less explicitly makes the assumption that there is an observer independent reality) it can be either optimized on how closely it matches said reality OR how much that function helps survival. Right, I got that. My point is that in order to define what it is to "match reality," you have to already have a theory of mind and consciousness. Think of what he says just after that: > For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and large—it only sees red—even though such a distinction exists in reality. This already has so much baggage to unpack that it's ludicrous. An organism which "sees" red or green already has consciousness--it's converting nerve stimuli into symbols which it interprets. An unconscious being wouldn't see a color, it would simply react. But let's say you do already have "consciousness." In that case, why is it necessarily going to be more complex to map the stimuli to "red" or "green" within consciousness, instead of prior to consciousness? For all we know, it'd be simpler to do the mapping within consciousness (put another way: to map the stimuli "consciously," or to be "conscious" of the mapping). To know which is more complex, we'd have to have a clear idea of what consciousness is, and how it works at a biological level. (I don't think the metaphors I'm using here are accurate descriptions of how the mind works, incidentally. They're not much more than "just-so" stories. My point is that you have to have some kind of idea of what consciousness is before you can say things about a "function" which can "match said reality.")

jcfrei 10y ago
Ok, I think I can follow some of the points you are making. When I said I think you were being pedantic I meant you were taking the discussion to a meta level which is sort of beyond the scope of the interview. If you say we have to have a discussion about the nature of consciousness before we can talk about whether a function matches a reality then you have sort of put the cart before the horse, don't you think? I mean the whole purpose of mathematics is that we can talk about phenomenons in nature (such as consciousness) on a mutually agreed basis - if you take that basis away, I doubt there is very much left to talk about...
- maldusiecle 10y ago
  I don't think you can talk about consciousness on a mutually agreed basis using math. I think that very few people, when they talk about "consciousness," mean something that a mathematical model can describe straightforwardly.

jcfrei 10y ago

Ok, I think I can follow some of the points you are making. When I said I think you were being pedantic I meant you were taking the discussion to a meta level which is sort of beyond the scope of the interview. If you say we have to have a discussion about the nature of consciousness before we can talk about whether a function matches a reality then you have sort of put the cart before the horse, don't you think? I mean the whole purpose of mathematics is that we can talk about phenomenons in nature (such as consciousness) on a mutually agreed basis - if you take that basis away, I doubt there is very much left to talk about...

maldusiecle 10y ago
I don't think you can talk about consciousness on a mutually agreed basis using math. I think that very few people, when they talk about "consciousness," mean something that a mathematical model can describe straightforwardly.