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Article 3548 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Consciousness as cogitation on recent events
Message-ID: <1992Feb06.180033.3374@spss.com>
Date: 6 Feb 92 18:00:33 GMT
References: <1992Jan31.233453.7625@news.media.mit.edu> <1992Feb3.113723.2519@arizona.edu> <1992Feb4.151115.5600@news.media.mit.edu>
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In article <1992Feb4.151115.5600@news.media.mit.edu> minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>No what's the right kind of computation.  What I've been trying to say
>is that what we call consciousness is a big collection of functions,
>but the most striking (in my opinion) are the functions that give rise
>to being able to think about (that is, make calculations and plans
>based on) descriptions of recent events.  You can quarrel about the
>precise definitions, but it is the functional aspects of this (not the
>"subjective" ones) that concern me here.  To do such things, you need
>neural nets that have some nice memory properties and some nice
>pattern-recognition properties.  Otherwise, it's just any old FSA.  

Hm, I had thought your view of neural nets was a bit more chilly.
Why do you "need neural nets" for this task?  (As opposed to, say,
procedures?)


