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From: chris@labtam.labtam.oz.au (Chris Taylor)
Subject: Re: Consciousness is the comprehension of time
Message-ID: <chris.804732064@labtam>
Organization: Labtam Australia Pty. Ltd., Melbourne, Australia
References: <3sd988$jra@ping1.ping.be> <gordon.803924867@spot.Colorado.EDU> <3sh1ma$rle@prime.mdata.fi> <chris.804324136@labtam> <3t4g94$pjl@ping1.ping.be>
Date: Mon, 3 Jul 1995 00:41:04 GMT
Lines: 138

Stephan.Verbeeck@ping1.ping.be (Stephan Verbeeck) writes:

>chris@labtam.labtam.oz.au (Chris Taylor) wrote:
>>I think you can say that consciousness and the passage of time
>>are inextricably linked.
>>"Perception of time flow" is a required feature of consciousness
>>but not a fundamental description of the phenomenon.

>That is correct but comprehension is far more then perception.

But fundamentally different or just a complexification?


>>Personally I think it's problematic to define consciousness in terms
>>of something that 'humans have' but insects and computers don't.
>>It is best treated as something that is a matter of degree.
>>Humans, insects, bacteria and computer-algorithms can all have internal
>>models of their environment built in (or evolved).
>>In that very basic sense they are all 'conscious' by my definition,
>>but by vastly differing degrees.
>>..

>I do not agree.  There is a difference between inteligence and awareness.
>...
>Like I interpret the term consciousness only humans and some animals (ape,
>delphine, cat, dog?, octopusy?,...) are conscious.


It depends on how you want to define conciousness.

If you want to define something with very similiar properties to
a human, then you use the human as the referance and work backwards,
nominating other lifeforms whose behaviour suggests similar skills
or complexity.

You would make strong referance to skills like "ability to predict
future outcomes" - wherin the internal model has the ability to
model several potential outcomes and make judgements accordingly.

This is a skill that appears absent from lifeforms down at the insect level
and so makes a good basis for justifying that humans are concious but insects
are not.


I was starting from the other end and trying to find the most basic
definition that could cover everything that could possibly be a candidate
for being conscious. You would probably prefer to use the word 'awareness'
for that.
That is reasonable, but my suggestion was that conciousness really
is just awareness. Conciousness at the human level has highly developed
skills like "lookahead" - and you may prefer to to limit the definition of
conciousness to awareness with these properties present.

Distinguishing between awareness and conciousness is fair enough 
(assuming there are agreed distinguishing properties) - and it suits
most practical discussions by providing sensible differentiation between
human-level and insect-level. 


However, my point was aimed toward asking whether at the fundamental level
there really is any significant difference between awareness and conciousness.

We can point to "lookahead" in human beings.
Human beings can create complex hypotheses about future outcomes
and make judgments based on these. The judgments might be made by
weighing up past experience or intuition (genetically pre-programmed
experience?) or 'free-will' (random component?).

A lower lifeform tends to act automatically rather than pondering
on future outcomes. 
The higher lifeforms seem to engage longer in pondering.
Is this a sign of a different phenomenon called 'conciousness',
or is it just the sign of a more complex system where a variety of
potential reponses are stimulated and projected into a sort of 'lookahead'
buffer (crudely speaking) where they may undergo several selection processes.

Admittedly there is a more complicated response, but is it fundamentally
any different?

Can't an extremely simple system be set up to have 'lookahead'.
Perhaps ants do not have this ability at all, but surely in principle
they could. (In practice there is perhaps little advantage for an ant
to have any 'lookahead' - so hence it tends to not be developed)

When an ant encounters a situation where there are conflicting constraints,
does it not become delayed by indecisiveness? One imagines that the
conflicting constraints trigger conflicting reponses which must be
resolved - perhaps somewhat randomly.

Even though the ant may lack a 'lookahead' buffer to store
future hypothesis, it's pondering behaviour is analogous to human
decision process.

The difference is that with a lookahead buffer a complex series of
outcomes can be projected and then weighted. An ant behaves like
it has a lookahead buffer of perhaps one or zero (depending how you
want to define the operation). 

In this light 'human-conciousness' and 'ant-conciousness' seem to
be differentiated by complexity rather than something fundamental.

You can point to the lookahead feature and say "that added feature
indicates conciousness" if you want.
But it's not a feature that in principle an ant could not have
a limited amount of.


Perhaps the complex lookahead ability that we percieve in ourselves (and
may classify as 'consciousness') is largely a consequence of slowness of our
internal workings. Our brains can not act fast enough to process stimuli
and make decisions in a single-step.
The issues are classified into options and submitted for pondering.
Often the pondering delays decision for very long periods, due to
multiplicities of conflicts - until some inbalance finally occurs.

There can be the sense of problems being re-submitted repeatedly
when a decision can not be triggered, fishing for new options.
We might call this thinking or reasoning.

Sometimes a rather arbitrary decision might be made.
We might call this free will, or is it just a matter of
a random inbalance being magnified or selected when events
dictate immediate resolution.


We are aware of the rather long (and variable) time the decision process takes.
If we could make these decisions much more rapidly, wouldn't we appear more
insect-like? (or robot-like?) 


For higher level lifeforms it might be advantagious to ponder longer,
as new information might arrive to clarify a complex situation.
If we acted almost immediately to all stimuli I imagine that human
behaviour would be more 'unstable'. Responding more slowly tends to
average out 'noise' in the environmewnt. Perhaps we are to a degree evolved
so that our response time is in sync with the general rate of change of
our environment. Still I assume that to some extent the slowness is due
to practical limitations.
