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Article 6793 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Consciousness
Message-ID: <1992Sep6.010048.1@watt.ccs.tuns.ca>
>From: jamalin@watt.ccs.tuns.ca
Date: 6 Sep 92 01:00:48 AST
Lines: 27

In article <1992Sep2.133929.2794@uwm.edu> markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark) writes:

>   Consciousness exists everywhere and in everything, like the background in
>a picture.  But you need a sufficient degree of self-awareness to see the part
>that lies in you.  So naturally people are going to confuse having
>self-awareness with being conscious.  But what I see runs far deeper than
>mere perception.
>   A good approximation of what it's like having a consciousness without any
>self-awareness is when you're in a deep sleep, or even better when you're
>asleep and in a dream that has no first person point of view.  I've had plenty
>of those: dreams in which I wasn't there and didn't exist.

I tend to believe that consciousness comes as a result of "realizing" the
concept "I", which may be considered equivalent to one's starting to believe in
self-existence. Conscious reasoning uses "I" as a distinct entity, trying
to bring "related" parameters to desirable values. Non-conscious reasoning,
au contrary, attempts discovering means of causing _instinctively_ desirable
events. This happens without a "realization" of self-existence.

Nadeem

--
Nadeem Jamali                                e-mail: jamalin@newton.ccs.tuns.ca

School of Computer Science
Technical University of Nova Scotia          phone: (902)420-7882



