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Article 7448 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: burt@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca (Burt Voorhees)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: We've Been Tricked- consciousness
Message-ID: <burt.720424953@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca>
Date: 30 Oct 92 06:02:33 GMT
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>>But in the case of consciousness my own opinion
>>is that this question of definition will be extra
>>tricky.  In particular, I don't think that it will
>>be posssible to define consciousness in terms of
>>what it _is_, but only negatively, in terms of
>>what it _is not_.
>Ok.  I'll start.  Consciousness is not an apple.  It is not sunlight.
>It is not a midnight swim.

>There, that is a few things it is not.
Wrong.  All those things are, or can be contents of consciousness,
and can be objects of intentional identification.

>Face it, you cannot define anything by defining what it is not.  Better
Well, the via negativa is pretty well accepted as a route of definition...

>to recognize that consciousness is not currently understood well enough
>to be definable.  As long as you avoid making consciousness the center
>point of some other argument, that should not be a big problem.
But consciousness is the real issue--we must screw our courage to the
sticking point, as it were, and take some position.

>>                   My own preferred definition is that
>>consciousness is that which is beyond all possible distinctions.

>Well, if you give a mystical definition, you should not be surprised if
>it seems mysterious.
I don't see anything at all mysterious about this definition, such as it
is.  If you prefer something more in vogue try: the field within which
distinctions occur.  This has a philosophical pedigree that goes back
to Parmenides.  The real challenge is, given this definition, what does
it buy me?  Far as I can tell, it buys alot.

>>                                  I admit that this is
>>a rather radical view, but it does save lots of hand
>>waving later on.

>Right.  You do all your hand waving up front.
You, I guess, prefer a reducto ad absurdum.

Now, as to defining consciousness negatively:
you are presumably conscious--unless I'm being
subjected to a Turing test hter--yet I challenge
you to come up with a single thing which you can say
that your consciousness is.  And there we're not
even talking about consciousness, but about self-consciousness
which is not necessairly the same thing.  The best
that you can do is to say that self-consciousness
is a result of some internal process which is
as yet not understood.  But when you separate
the awareness of this self from the self-process
you're still left with consciousness.  You may
say that this is just an emergent process, or
property of the neural processes in your brain.
Okay, give me a theory.  I prefer to take the
point of view that consciousness is given a
priori and develop my theorizing from there.
bv


