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Article 3400 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and Panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Feb2.170040.6615@news.media.mit.edu>
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Cc: misnky
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References: <1992Jan28.164410.9509@psych.toronto.edu> <21879@life.ai.mit.edu> <1992Feb2.030815.1207@memstvx1.memst.edu>
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1992 17:00:40 GMT
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In article <1992Feb2.030815.1207@memstvx1.memst.edu> langston@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>In article <21879@life.ai.mit.edu>, minsky@transit.ai.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>
>> As for "consciousness" the situation is worse.  There are lots of
>> mental phenomena sometimes called by that name, but so far as I can
>> see, what they mostly share in common is
>> _short_term_memories_about_recent_mental_states.  I don't believe that
>> we are in any deep sense "self-aware"; we have virtually no sense of
 [...]

>  I agree somewhat with the idea that STM plays a major role in the
>emergence of consciousness.  I will even go so far as to agree with the
>notion that everything we are consciously aware of has already happened, and
>is being remembered. (albeit the delay between event and remembrance may be
>infintesimally small...)  Much of what the mind deals with is day to day
>living, and most of that is unconscious reaction to the environment. (I may
>have exaggerated this, but a good portion, nonetheless)
>  My point is this:  How and/or why was the event remembered in the first
>place?  We now have the players (memories), and the stage (STM), but where/what
>is the director?  I don't mean to sound pushy about my ideas, but would it
>not be sensible to say that these events are brought into STM through the
>process of trying to satisfy some goal?  (if I'm beating a dead horse, please
>tell me...)
    e.g., Why would I 'remember' (the term suggests a longer period of
time than
we are dealing with here) that I smiled?  There must be some reason behind
>my needing to remember I smiled.  To assess a reaction?  To assess an internal
>state?  To revise my goal stack?  What brought the memory into play?  There
>must be some agent somewhere that needed that information.  I would also 
>say that this agent was acting at the conscious level, otherwise we would not
>be aware of the smile (the agent could get the information subconsciously.)
>  I see nothing wrong in the argument for consciousness re:short term memory,
>except for the fact that there is nothing offered explaining how/why things
>are brought into STM in the first place. 
--

Mark C. Langston        
Psychology Department   
Memphis State University
LANGSTON@MEMSTVX1.MEMST.EDU
>-- 

Yes, that's just what I mean.  Memory retrieval is complicated because
different parts of the brain have so many different functions, but
surely many retrivals are "GPS" based - that is, retrieved because
they are stored in systems that are keyed by goals -- or, rather, in
the Newell-Simon sense of goal, they are triggerred by the detection
of a certain difference between a goal-target description and a
description of the current situation.  Surely you can think of lots of
reasons why things get put into short-term memory.  The difficulty of
describing consciousness may relate to the apparent fact that we don't
seem to have good short-term memory records of the machinery that puts
things into short term memory:-).  I have a couple of guesses about
why this might be -- and hence why we're not concious of the
mechanisms that lead to consciousness.  One is that the GPS machinery
may load the temporary copy from LTM into the same area that made the
retrieval request.  The other, more philosophical, is that the
problem-solving act of asking yourself why you thought of X might
disturb the records, if there are some, of why you thought of X. (This
reminds me of Gilbert Ryle once arguing that a person might be better at
explaining why a good friend did X that explaining his own behavior.)




