obanite said:
Very good point; what is consciousness when stripped of any anthropomorphic hangovers?
consciousness is a cognitive network with both external structural coupling (ie. both "senses" and actual immersion and participation in a changing system that has energy being pumped into it) and internal structural coupling (ie. the processes of cognition - the ongoing feedback-looped changes in structure - are themselves affected by themselves).
Is a CPU/BIOS that knows about its operating temperature and automatically adjusts fan speeds/shuts down if it gets too high exhibiting some form of self-awareness? I'd say no because it's hard-coded.
that's not really self-awareness but interestingly it is an example of a feedback loop. computer gets hot - fan speeds up - computer cools down - fan slows down. all the variables in this system orbit an attractor in a phase-space (no really) until conditions change. cognitive networks are built out of systems like this - a form of incredibly complex hierarchy of feedback loops inside loops inside loops inside loops.
Are babies self-aware? I remember vaguely when doing developmental psychology that there's a point at which children become capable of thinking of themselves in the third person. Is this a requirement for consciousness, or can something thinking purely in first person terms be truly sentient?
you want to be careful here. i've forgotten his name but an American philosopher/psychologist made a real name for himself with this line of thinking a few years back. horribly, it was hijacked by media and far-right anti-abortionist lobbies as an example of the evil of secular science and philosophy and he was splashed all over BBC2 like taramasalata on an incredibly dry old piece of rye bread.
the argument runs, if abortion is ok, then it's reasonable to kill children as well. abortion is often justified on the grounds that the foetus is not yet conscious, that it
is alive and reacts to stimuli (some would say "programmed" but then, they would) but only in the way a lower animal is alive and reacts. they do not have self-awareness.
but nor does the foetus
after it is born. in fact human babies are more helpless, less able to act on instinct (instinct = inherited structural biases in the cognitive network which prompt action), and less able to process their senses than many other newborn animals. we kill and eat animals. therefore we could kill and eat babies. it does not matter what you do to children or animals because basically they are considerably less self-aware than yow, and therefore
don't really suffer the way you do. altogether now ahhhhhh diddums.
my reaction to this is, fuck off you psychobiscuit, i'm a queer vegetarian and your silly babies-and-meat-eating arguments just slide off me like hot butter on the arse of Bernard Manning.
(i actually remember the day when i first thought about myself thinking. i nearly fell over.)
...yup, you could be right there...
