Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!departed
From: departed@netcom.com (just passing through)
Subject: What makes up consciousness?
Message-ID: <departedD3vKy5.M3B@netcom.com>
Summary: How is consciousness a continuum?
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 1995 07:03:41 GMT
Lines: 56
Sender: departed@netcom18.netcom.com

Some proposed ideas/questions:

1) 'Consciousness' must be a continuum in some respect.  If we're to assume
   that consciousness has any relation to the physical world, perhaps growing 
   out of it as if the physical world is a substratum, then there must be a 
   more or less continuous scale of consciousness -- consciousness must exist 
   in some sense at all levels between what we ordinarily perceive as 
   consciousness and conscious experience, and the physical world, which seems 
   not to manifest consciousness at all per se.
   What foundations then is consciousness built on?  Is it immediately
   emergent from some context like the brain in one step, or
   can you track it down through various levels that seem less and less
   conscious?
   Is the concept of consciousness as applied to a rock (say) just meaningless?
   Or can we say that a rock has consciousness in ~0 amount?  Across what
   kind of entities can we apply the term, if not rocks and brains?
2) Usual models of consciousness seem to stop a little short of tracking the
   whole continuum.  If we take consciousness as being a self-model, or even
   a group of agents as per Minsky's Society of Mind model, this seems
   relevant and even interesting until we reflect that such models do little
   to justify our ongoing _experience_ of being conscious.  Admittedly,
   introspection is a difficult tool to use for analysis, but at least 
   it shows a phenomenon of ongoing conscious experience that demands to be
   explained.
   Who or what is inside Minsky's 'agents'? What is fueling the process of
   awareness that runs self-modelling?  Are those processes completely
   robotic & might as well be run by a machine, or the brain directly?  If
   so, what makes the experience of consciousness so rich -- why and how
   are we aware (on a 'conscious' level) of things going beyond any particular
   agent, and beyond our own self-images?
   It seems to me that these models are only skimming off the top layer or
   so, a layer that's the highly abstracted or crystallized version of the
   layers underneath.  There is a lot of activity going on that is much more
   amorphous.
3) What does consciousness consist of?  This relates to (1) -- we have to have
   a technical definition of consciousness before we can say that there is
   a spectrum of consciousness that applies across a continuum.  Is there
   any definition of consciousness that uses terms less complex and ambiguous
   than 'consciousness'?  Is there any definition that is scalable to different
   _levels_ (or amounts) of consciousness?  Perhaps (in the case of the self-
   modelling paradigm) we could try to figure out what the _difference_ is
   between the system of model-with-controlling-awareness, and the controlling
   awareness by itself, since presumably one of the components of a conscious
   system is less conscious than the system itself (if, as before, 'conscious'
   even applies to a component of a conscious system.)
   Have you ever been 'sort of' conscious?  What was it that was less present
   at that time?
4) Have you ever been conscious without being conscious-of something?
   Is it a necessary property of consciousness to be aware of something,
   or is it actually meaningful to speak of consciousness by itself?

Anyhow, thanks for considering these questions.  I have my own ideas as to
how to answer them, naturally, but I would like to hear your answers first.

-- Richard Wesson (departed@netcom.com)

