The Order Beneath the Chaos Beneath the Order -

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			The Order Beneath the Chaos Beneath the Order -

shaktool


	Ready for more crazy philosophy? Consciousness is the derivative of the brain. As I type this, my brain is constantly throwing signals around, constructing sequences of ideas and then translating it all into English. The internal state of my brain is animated. I am changing my mind. If you were to take a snapshot of my brain, it would not be a snapshot of consciousness, even if you were able to represent whatever mental image I had in my brain when the snapshot was taken. Maybe I was picturing a red balloon. Maybe there were a bunch of items hanging out in my short term memory that also get represented in this snapshot. But no matter how accurate and detailed that snapshot of my brain is, it is still not a snapshot of consciousness, because it is static. The moment my brain stops changing is the moment I lose consciousness. If you were to freeze me, or put me in so-called "suspended animation", and then reanimate me an hour later, I would lose and regain consciousness. This makes intuitive sense, but I feel that this is a clear, clean example of precisely what consciousness is: an animated brain. Or, more generally: an animated, self-modifying system. Caveat: The popular definition of "consciousness" excludes sleep and dreams, but mine does not exclude dreams. I feel that dreams are more of an interruption to awareness than to consciousness. Most computer programs do not change their mind. A human programmer writes a program once, and then the program remains static, aside from shuffling some data around using a predetermined algorithm. This is why conventional computer programs are not conscious. Current Music: Kevin MacLeod - Skye Cuillin

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	From: platypuslord	Date: May 3rd, 2008 06:02 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Clever!

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	From: stephenp	Date: May 4th, 2008 06:14 pm (UTC)		(Link)

You should check out a book called "The Physical Basis of Mind". It's a few years old, but it's by Basil Blackwell and shouldn't be hard to find. Check your local library's website first.

It's very relevant to some of your points.

I won't comment on all of what you've said for time constraints, but I'd love to talk over beers with you someday about it. What I will say is that I've recently learned of computer chips scientists are experimenting with now that actually have the ability to "adapt" and "evolve" in order to add redundancy, and improve efficiency. This combined with a recursively running algorithm will someday lead to a new "thought" or piece of information, not previously programmed into the machine, that could not have been calculated directly. Almost sounds like Frankenstein's magic.

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	From: shaktool	Date: May 4th, 2008 07:01 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I am of the opinion that consciousness, as I define it, could be attained with our current hardware. Computer programs are already capable of generating new instructions to execute at runtime, and then executing them. Just-In-Time Compilers already do this, though they are really just translating human-written instructions from one language to a language that the computer knows how to execute. They may not be inventing their own instructions, but they demonstrate that there is nothing stopping the program from executing instructions that it didn't have when it started.

If human-like consciousness is the goal, though, then I agree that current computer hardware isn't fit for the job. Human brains are full of parallel processing, which is something our computers are fundamentally bad at, although FPGAs are close...

Thanks for the book recommendation!

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10:52 pm May 2nd, 2008