From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!wupost!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!minsky Tue Feb 11 15:25:50 EST 1992
Article 3592 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!wupost!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!minsky
>From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Consciousness as cogitation on recent events
Message-ID: <1992Feb8.034542.16544@news.media.mit.edu>
Sender: news@news.media.mit.edu (USENET News System)
Cc: minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
References: <1992Feb3.113723.2519@arizona.edu> <1992Feb4.151115.5600@news.media.mit.edu> <1992Feb06.180033.3374@spss.com>
Date: Sat, 8 Feb 1992 03:45:42 GMT
Lines: 28

In article <1992Feb06.180033.3374@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>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?)

I suppose I should have said "nets of neural nets" or something.  I
presumed we were speaking about brain-like machines, and brains are
collections of different kinds of neural nets arranged in
sophisticated architectures.  At various places in Society of Mind I
suggest that many of the phenomena we refer to with the term
"consciousness" are processes that involve some parts of the system
reacting to short-term memory-summaries of the recent states of other
parts of the system.  I don't think it is meaningful to think that you
can be conscious of something that's happening at the present
instance, for various reasons, one of which is that each neuron taks a
finite time to react to a change in each other neuron.



