4 ms·
Mixing consciousness with cognition is a mistake, Imagine a conscious experience of constant redness and nothing else, is there any intelligence needed for this
by krzat 3y ago
Mixing consciousness with cognition is a mistake, Imagine a conscious experience of constant redness and nothing else, is there any intelligence needed for this?
- teekert 3y agoI think all these term are too loaded and deep to answer your question, almost all words in the sentences we exchange are subject to subtle interpretation and definition differences. I still enjoy the process though, which perhaps also doesn't require consciousness, yet here I am.
- tsimionescu 3y agoI think it's arguable that this "conscious experience of nothing but constant redness" might not be actually possible. We can imagine it, of course, but we can also imagine many things that can't actually exist in the world. It's similar to the idea about p-zombies: just because a concept exists doesn't mean it's physically realizable. It's very much possible that what we would call consciousness can only exist in certain types of minds that have a particular level of intelligence, but also a particular structure. Of course, it's also possible that you're right and the two are entirely separate, and that consciousness doesn't require intelligence (and possibly vice-versa).
- quonn 3y agoThe reason why this is likely not possible is because consciousness appears to require a notion of time passing by and having a constant experience means that there is no time. For time to exist some sort of motion is needed, including either internal motion like the perception of breathing or a heartbeat or a train of thought or external ones like a clock or a change of color from red to blue.
- vidarh 3y agoWe have no way of knowing whether there is any time even with the "notion of time passing", as that notion depends on a notion of memory of a past, and we have no way of knowing if that is real, including whether or not there is a train of thought or any change.
- quonn 3y agoYou are misunderstanding what I wrote.
- vidarh 3y agoI don't think so. The point being that we can't tell whether we're having a "constant experience" or not, and we can't tell from that whether or not there's any time or no time, or punctuated time, nor can we for that matter tell whether consciousness requires any notion of time. It's all pure speculation because we have no way of assessing it outside of our own frame of reference. E.g. I see you in another answer saying that "the fact is that all kinds of state changes happen", but we don't know if any state changes ever happen. We have no way of telling a dynamic universe apart from a static one where we're all just suspended in a single unchanging moment. We can choose to handwave a lot of this away ordinarily because as long as the experience is reasonably consistent it makes sense to assume it is objectively real, because we have nothing better. It doesn't matter if the world didn't exist a second ago when e.g. considering whether gravity work, because it appears as if it did. But when trying to determine the nature of consciousness we run headlong into the fact our observation of consciousness is direct only in the case of ourself, and even then heavily limited. We have no direct measure that puts us in a position to prove consciousness even in other people. We can show that within our perceived world we can measure brain activity that correlates to though, but not whether that reflects merely the operation of an automata, or the existence of consciousness, or if there is a distinction at all. As such, it's meaningless to suggest we have a way of saying much about the limitations of consciousness at all.