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The issue presented at the beginning of the article is (as most philosophical issues are) one of semantics. Philosophers as I understand it use "consciousness"

The issue presented at the beginning of the article is (as most philosophical issues are) one of semantics. Philosophers as I understand it use "consciousness" as the quality shared by things that are able to have experiences. A rock gets wet by the rain, but humans "feel" wet when it rains. A bat might not self-reflect but it feels /something/ when it uses echo-location. On the other hand, conciseness in our everyday use of the term is very tied to the idea of attention and awareness, i.e. a "conscious action" or an "unconscious motivation". This is a very Freudian concept, that there are thoughts we think and others that lay behind. The philosophical consciousness is much more holistic, but also very vague. You wouldn't think a tree has an Ego, but it might have some sort of existential awareness. It's cool to see the philosophy of consciousness intersect with neuroscience, since outsiders like me tend to think of these fields as at-odds.

deleted 9y ago
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simonh 9y ago
Listening to Marvin Minsky on Closer To Truth on Youtube was a revelation for me. As in many philosophical debates, before you even start to begin to think about and communicate about a subject you have to get your terminology clear and accurate. Conciseness is a suitcase term that contains within it a mass of different mental processes. It's just not useful to talk about it much in general, except that it's so general a term which frankly we just don't understand yet. If we did, we'd at least have a general idea of how to design one and we don't. Rather than try and make any more pronouncements about this, I'll just refer to what he has to say on the subject as he does a much better job than I ever could. This is a good primer on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r70jzcmMxU&list=PLFJr3pJl27pIGTG8LiAqVOPM7zudt-Dlv&index=6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r70jzcmMxU&list=PLFJr3pJl27... Here's a great explanation of this in the form of an apparently simple example scenario and the very many different faculties of the brain that in entails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPeVMDYodN8&list=PLFJr3pJl27pIGTG8LiAqVOPM7zudt-Dlv&index=10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPeVMDYodN8&list=PLFJr3pJl27...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

simonh 9y ago

Listening to Marvin Minsky on Closer To Truth on Youtube was a revelation for me. As in many philosophical debates, before you even start to begin to think about and communicate about a subject you have to get your terminology clear and accurate. Conciseness is a suitcase term that contains within it a mass of different mental processes. It's just not useful to talk about it much in general, except that it's so general a term which frankly we just don't understand yet. If we did, we'd at least have a general idea of how to design one and we don't. Rather than try and make any more pronouncements about this, I'll just refer to what he has to say on the subject as he does a much better job than I ever could. This is a good primer on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r70jzcmMxU&list=PLFJr3pJl27pIGTG8LiAqVOPM7zudt-Dlv&index=6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r70jzcmMxU&list=PLFJr3pJl27... Here's a great explanation of this in the form of an apparently simple example scenario and the very many different faculties of the brain that in entails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPeVMDYodN8&list=PLFJr3pJl27pIGTG8LiAqVOPM7zudt-Dlv&index=10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPeVMDYodN8&list=PLFJr3pJl27...