> On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, John Clark wrote:
>
> > Robert J. Bradbury <bradbury@aeiveos.com> Wrote:
> >
> > >most human behavior is driven off of these types of tables and is
> > >therefore rarely 'conscious'.
> > ^^^^^^^
> > I get stuck on the "therefore". The connection between look up tables
> > and a lack of consciousness escapes me. Perhaps I'm just not
> > conscious of the relationship.
>
> While the brain has some lookup tables as has been discussed,
> it doesn't seem (to me) to be 'conscious' if you remove all of
> the active neural activity. A lookup table (potentially with
> the addition of some fuzzy logic to keep them from getting
> astronomically huge) has no 'activity' other than the
> retreival of a stream of bits from the table and running
> them through the output device (this is what I'm calling
> a zombie, though others may call this other things).
Of course a human brain without neural activity is not concious at that
moment -- then again, that human brain won't be using these 'lookup tables',
since a human brain without neural activity hardly is having any activity at
all (ex definitio).
But I still don't buy -- myself -- the argument that the consciousness or
not of an entity relies entirely on their internal representation; that is,
whether they react according to a lookup table, or according to some
mystical other.
> My brain on the other hand, is conscious because I take
> what is coming out of the lookup tables, an run a mini-sim
> on the result of outputing that bit-stream. I observe
> whether that result is desirable and if that evaluation
> rates it as a 'good' behavior, I execute the program.
This mini-sim, how is it built? What does it do? What tells you that it
cannot be equivalent to some sort of 'lookup table'; to some sort of
function mapping the input (that is output from the first function) to some
sort of output (the desirability rating)?
It still seems to be two functions; that are composed in order to form
'consciousness' according to you -- so what says that this composite
function isn't conscious in itself?
<overview over automized behaviour viewed as human zombie-ship snipped>
> Robert
// Mikael Johansson
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:43 MDT