Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk (Oliver Sparrow)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!newshost.marcam.com!zip.eecs.umich.edu!caen!math.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!peernews.demon.co.uk!chatham.demon.co.uk!ohgs
Subject: Re: What makes up consciousness?
References: <departedD3vKy5.M3B@netcom.com>
Organization: Royal Institute of International Affairs
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Date: Mon, 13 Feb 1995 17:39:21 +0000
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One makes a mistake if one assumes that all of the things that one can label 
in one's experience are attributably made of other things, as an Airfix 
fighter is made up of little bits of plastic. There is no reason to suggest 
that consciousness is somehow dissectable into the "molecules of awareness" of 
which it is made up. We can say how the cogs and weights in a clock make the 
hands go round; and we can talk of gravity and pendula, spacetime continua and 
entropy. None of these tell us about "telling the time" or the reasons why 
clocks get assemebled. This is something that it takes a human or their 
agent to perform and it can only be decoded by reference to the social system 
in which humans are embedded. You can pull this system into bits - to 
discuss the history of clocks, why people are late, how Venezuelans differ 
from Norwegians in this respect... - but a reductionist Final Answer as to the 
"role of clocks in modern society" can never be a complete one and never be 
more than phenomenological. There can never be a grand unified theorum of 
timekeeping, not least because the subject is heterogenous, evolving, self-
referential and highly dependent upon the circumstances of the individual 
concerned.

Can we have a Grand Unified Theory of Awareness? One would have to think of 
what would it be made and how might these components be unified. A crude 
approach - that like Frankenstein, one stiches a chunk of this activity to a 
lump of that - might well give rise to a Thing that reports all of the features 
which you or I report when we think about being aware. Would such a recipe be a 
GUT of A? I think not. 

To get down in the GUTA, one would need to grapple with a dynamic which 
described how self-organising patterns of information came to be, evolving from 
data streams on a substrate which had predispositions and attractors (yes, Dr 
Rickert, we know, we know). In such a description, one would be looking for 
two things, I think:

1: As self-organising filters and detectors came to be in this system, so the 
   interplay of these elements would give rise to ever-more complex processes 
   of data discrimination and prediction. If we followed what happened very 
   closely, we could probably track all such nodes in the evolving tapestry of 
   interaction. Photons go in, (Red Square AND Blue Spot) detection comes out.

2: At some stage, the rope of nodes that arises from one area - say, vision - 
   would begin to interact with chains of structures which had arisen from 
   another - say, from taste.(*note, below) The complex pattern of output from 
   the hierarchy that we will calll Sight might well be represented in an N 
   space with complete fidelity: a bundle of vectors. Equally, the M space of 
   the outcome of the Taste hierarchy would be describable. Suppose that 
   Taste's output begins to modify Vision's learned hierarchy - altering its 
   "rope of nodes" and, vica versa, Vision does the job on Taste's integrity. 
   This is what we call associative learning; and what comes out of it is an 
   association between two independent streams of DP. A New Thing has emerged: 
   the organismish thingoid now can salivate when it sees a Choccie Biscuit. It 
   could apply for a job in the civil service.

One can see how (1) can arise from clockwork tickings down amongst the neurons, 
weights or however you go about this sort of thing. Mechanical birds do it, 
bees do it, even educated fleas do it. Given the nature of the process, one can 
see more or less what is likely to cone out of a given architecture. 

This is not true of (2), however, because one needs to know the nature of the 
outcome before one can begin to find the explanation that one would need to 
describe this outcome. If one began without knowing the outcome - 
unprompted by experience with similar systems, for example - then this 
would be somewhat like formally criticising a movie that you have not yet seen 
(which is not of itself enough to stop some people, but there you go.) 

A GUTA - a theory of consciousness - has to grapple with this property of 
emergence, whereby something describable after the event is created from the 
interaction of components to which it has only an oblique connection. The 
emergent is not "made of" the structures from which it is woven, but rather 
lies over them, in a circumstance in which they are necessary conditions for 
its activities but do not constitute the whole of what it does. Consciousness 
- with all of the caveats with which I began - could only be captured in a  
GUTA which took these self-referential and volatile processes of interaction 
and evolution as the bedrock. This is a task as difficult as inventing quantum 
mechanics without either the mathematics, the repeatability or the ability to 
observe. But then, that is exactly what they achieved in building QM from 
nothing, so there's hope for us all yet.


(*NOTE nb this is an example. A real biological being (RBB) would have these 
chains integrated from neonatehood, of course. This is a thought experiment 
about RBBs)

_________________________________________________

  Oliver Sparrow
  ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk
