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The argument presented here is almost identical to the one by Doug Hofstadter first in his book "Godel, Escher and Bach" and later in more detail in "I am a Str

The argument presented here is almost identical to the one by Doug Hofstadter first in his book "Godel, Escher and Bach" and later in more detail in "I am a Strange Loop". In other words - consciousness or the subjective feeling of experiencing qualia, is the brain's recursive interpretation of its interpretation of the external world.

themgt 12y ago
I strongly disagree; Hofstadter is far more ready to admit that consciousness is a real phenomenon, causally relevant phenomenon, not an illusion, e.g. "who shoves whom around". Whereas this guy is buying wholesale into the idea that the brain literally "doesn’t in fact have this property [of self-awareness]", which is so beyond non-sensical it's barely worth responding to. Who is it that experiences the illusion of consciousness? Turtles [illusions] all the way down? This statement in particular is just utterly laughable horseshit: "In neuroscience, attention is a process of enhancing some signals at the expense of others. It’s a way of focusing resources. Attention: a real, mechanistic phenomenon that can be programmed into a computer chip. Awareness: a cartoonish reconstruction of attention that is as physically inaccurate as the brain’s internal model of color." - really? Go show me the math and computer simulation of neuroscience's understanding of the real, mechanistic phenomenon of attention, the way humans and other sentient beings experience it, programmed into a computer. Let's see some code.
pointernil 12y ago
... maybe by actively attributing those "experienced qualia" to an experiencing subject: it self. "Consciousness and the Social Brain" - Michael S. A. Graziano: provides a thesis on how and in what stages this could have developed via (social) evolution...
- pointernil 12y ago
  ehmmm, well that's what the article by the same author says which i did not read before posting this ;)

themgt 12y ago

I strongly disagree; Hofstadter is far more ready to admit that consciousness is a real phenomenon, causally relevant phenomenon, not an illusion, e.g. "who shoves whom around". Whereas this guy is buying wholesale into the idea that the brain literally "doesn’t in fact have this property [of self-awareness]", which is so beyond non-sensical it's barely worth responding to. Who is it that experiences the illusion of consciousness? Turtles [illusions] all the way down? This statement in particular is just utterly laughable horseshit: "In neuroscience, attention is a process of enhancing some signals at the expense of others. It’s a way of focusing resources. Attention: a real, mechanistic phenomenon that can be programmed into a computer chip. Awareness: a cartoonish reconstruction of attention that is as physically inaccurate as the brain’s internal model of color." - really? Go show me the math and computer simulation of neuroscience's understanding of the real, mechanistic phenomenon of attention, the way humans and other sentient beings experience it, programmed into a computer. Let's see some code.

pointernil 12y ago

... maybe by actively attributing those "experienced qualia" to an experiencing subject: it self. "Consciousness and the Social Brain" - Michael S. A. Graziano: provides a thesis on how and in what stages this could have developed via (social) evolution...

pointernil 12y ago
ehmmm, well that's what the article by the same author says which i did not read before posting this ;)