From: Emlyn (emlyn@one.net.au)
Date: Sun Dec 10 2000 - 03:07:35 MST
> Jason Joel Thompson <jasonjthompson@home.com> Wrote:
>
> >My PERSONAL SUSPICION (as yet unfounded in light of our current
> >understanding of the human brain,) is that our consciousness runs as
an
> >emergent sub-set of our current hardware and cannot be reduced to its
> >components in an effective fashion.
>
Ahh, that's the stuff I didn't read. Righto.
> If "emergent" is not just a euphemism for "magical" then this
consciousness
> generator of yours must be made of parts. If it's made of parts it can be
studied
> reductively.
>
> John K Clark jonkc@att.net
>
So if we take the hackneyed and probably misleading analogy of
consciousness-to-computer, the positions become these:
--- A program is a set of instructions to be carried out by a computer. It can be incribed in a stone tablet as well as stored in computer. A computer is a machine which knows how to interpret a set of instructions, and do what they instruct it to. A process is an instance of a program running on a computer. The same computer, running the same program multiple times simultaneously, is running multiple, distinct processes. --- John (and the Dennet camp in general?) maintain that consciousness/intelligence is the program. It is the pure information, the set of intructions, and thus has all the properties of digital information; particularly, it can be flawlessly copied. Copies are not distinct things; they are all the same information, and so are the same. Jason, and myself, and possibly David Chalmers (although I can't be certain of this), propose that consciousness is somehow part of the running process; it is distinct from the computer (or the wetware of the brain), it is also distinct from (although well described by) the program, the instructions which the machine is following; the way the brain is wired up. Damien, and probably someone else in the world, takes a third position; that intelligence/consciousness is actually the substrate, the computer, the physical brain. More acurately, I think he proposes that it is the combination of program and machine, the brain given a particular configuration. Am I correct in these attributions? Emlyn
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