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Article 6684 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Consciousness
Summary: Humans are the only animal with a real sense of time.
Keywords: cognition free-will
Message-ID: <1992Aug23.014900.16178@news.Hawaii.Edu>
Date: 23 Aug 92 01:49:00 GMT
References: <705@trwacs.fp.trw.com>
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In article <705@trwacs.fp.trw.com> erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com (Harry Erwin) writes:
>This is a summary of recent comments on consciousness.
>
>Mark Shanks: "Without getting into a behaviorist/free will discussion, I
>don't see any reason to invoke chaos as an influence on the perception of
>free will...."
>
>Comment: free will probably depends on being able to trace the causal
>chain backwards.
>
>Neil Rickert: "Usually we think of free will as the ability to make a
>decision, and have that decision affect what we do in the future.... Our
>sense that we have free will is really a strong argument for determinism."
>
>Comment: Rickert seems to be arguing that consciousness is a memory of
>previous decisions and outcomes. In my terminology, plans and payoffs.

It seems to me that one of the things that distinquishes humans from
other animals is that humans (at least in most cultures) have a real
sense of time, a sense of the past and future.  While certainly other
animals have memory in some sense, I don't think they have a real sense
of the past.  When a dog's owner comes back from being away at college,
for instance, and the dog seems totally overjoyed, I think it is only our
anthropomorphism that interprets this as meaning that the dog has been
aware that the owner was gone a very long time.  I realize that this is
pretty fuzzy speculation on my part, but there it is, for what it's worth. 

The point I really want to make is that human thought and culture depends
on having a consciousness of the future.  So that only humans are capable
of doing things today in the the anticipation of results days or
weeks or even years in the future.  Birds flying south for the winter or
building a nest in the spring don't seem to have this same sort of
conscious intentionality, although we anthropomorphically attribute it to
them.  Do beavers building a dam have some sort of awareness that it will
be nice to have a dam, or do they just enjoy dam building as an
activity?  I guess one could figure out experiments to test this.  

The awareness that humans have of the past also enables them to learn on
more than simply a Skinnerian reinforcement basis.  A human can think on
a basis of "I took such and such an action in the past and didn't get the
results I wanted, so how can I try things differently next time?"

Presumably this ability to consider hypothetical scenarios is one of the
main things that enables humans to develop culture and create progress. 
  
--

Imagination is greater than knowledge.  -- Einstein 

lady@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu         lady@uhunix.bitnet


