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> Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Yeah, this is the right question. All these proposition like "consciousness is an
by ordu 6y ago
> Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?
Yeah, this is the right question. All these proposition like "consciousness is an alpha-rhythm", or "consciousness is a EM waves" are just an destructive reductionism, trying to get rid of something too difficult to understand and to replace it with something of much easier nature. It is like attempts to reduce the problem of "free will" to a physical determinism. Free will is a psychological or social phenomena, it couldn't be equivalent to a physical phenomenon. It could be explained in terms of a physical phenomena. Maybe. (In this particular case I believe it is pointless.). But if proposition draws an equal sign between phenomena from completely different levels of abstraction, we must be suspicious.
But, ranting away, what is a consciousness? I like the most this explanation[1]. Consciousness is a tool to communicate with others and nothing more. All the thinking, decision making are done without help of consciousness, somehow the process is reflected in the consciousness, which allow to communicate the decision itself, motives behind the decision, and so on. Does explanation in terms of EM waves adds something to it? After this EM waves doesn't seem as an explanation at all. It is like ask what is async/await and to answer that it is all about transistors switching states.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192...
- 323454 6y agoHave a read of Blindsight by Peter Watts, it has an interesting take on this very idea. An alien species with advanced intelligence but not consciousness takes our attempts to communicate with it as an attack, intended to cause it to waste valuable resources on decoding our low information chatter. The implication is that consciousness is empty of content, merely supposed to be the relay from my subconscious processes that do the driving to other individuals corresponding processes. Our over-developed conscious behaviors are thus viewed as a kind of computer virus by other lifeforms.
- deepnotderp 6y agoBlindsight is also the name of a phenomenon that provides some evidence for the fascinating hypothesis that cognition and consciousness are at least to some degree, separate.
- bserge 6y agoThe articles are more focused on how the brain works, which imo is equally as important (though not as interesting for me), for purposes of copying/replicating consciousness/intelligence, for example.
- ordu 6y agoMaybe it is important to replicating consciousness, maybe it is not. At some point people thought that an ability to perform arithmetic operation is an exclusive ability of a human mind, but then machines grown to perform calculations better than humans without need to replicate human mind itself. Maybe consciousness is like calculations? Maybe to replicate it we need to understand it, not the underlying mechanisms of a particular device (brain) with an ability to be conscious?