“Perception of continuous life itself is an evolved psychological construct to protect sanity. Consciousness is not continuous. Your conscious self dies every night.”
- from a Slashdot comment today
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So what are dreams? Not a form of consciousness?
(I am probably opening a super mega uber can of worms I shall regret later)
I would say dreams are a form of consciousness. We don’t dream all
night though, only a very small part of it.
How can a conversation on consciousness not open a bag of worms? :)
I wouldn’t think that the lack of experience when you’re asleep makes your consciousness ‘dead’. That’s just being overly dramatic. Your consciousness just perceives time passing extremely quickly because it’s given nothing to base time upon.
@Kurt
So you would be conscious when your under general anaethesia as well? Both sleep and being generally aneasthetised are very similar in brain function?
How can you tell the difference between a consciousness that is disconnected/turned off/dead, or one that just has no memory of what took place? Since people with physical brain trauma can forget the past, it seems reasonable to believe that our consciousness memory is drawn from the physical mind. If your body’s senses or memory are suppressed, your consciousness can’t experience anything.
As to whether you’re ‘conscious’ when anaesthetised… it depends on how you define it. It could be that your consciousness never receives anything during that time, or it could be that you experience everything but immediately forget it.
@Kurt
It seems you hold to consciousness as an independant function that receives information from sensory organs and memory and thus forms experiences. That the negation of the stream if information can still leave consciousness intact and independant.
I’ve always held to the idea that consciousness is a metaprocess of the brain and it makes no more sense to talk of consciousness being independant of brain functions like memory and sensation than (to use a common analogy) a whirlpool can be independant of the water it’s made up of.
I guess this is ‘bag of worms’ territory now :)
As a programmer, I have no doubt that we will one day create an artificial intelligence that is capable of emulating a human’s behaviour. It will be made up by a series of physical processes, as I also think the human brain functions. However the one thing we can’t give it is a consciousness. My definition of ‘consciousness’ does not need to ‘do’ or ‘form’ anything. It is just the observer that somehow experiences the thoughts and sensations of the brain. Without it, the universe would run it’s deterministic course and there would be nothing there to experience it. There would be nothing to perceive time.
Maybe we will one day be able to point at something in the brain, and say that’s where our consciousness connects, but the observer is something that can’t be represented by anything physical. I have no idea what it could be beyond that, which is why I still like to say I’m agnostic.
While there is nothing to say that consciousness is a physical process there is also nothing to say it isn’t and that consciousness could be something that is created and destroyed by our brain.
I fall to occams razor and lump consciousness in with the physical. Almost everything else we used to assume as non-physical and ‘universal’ (life force, emotions, thoughts) have come to be known as a physical procees. I see no reason to think consciousness would be any different.
I don’t see it as ‘connecting’. That assumes it’s somehow a thing thats not part of the brain. I see it as integral to the brain.
As a result I see no reason why we couldn’t make a ‘machine’, either mechanical but sufficiently complex or modelled in software that couldn’t create consciousness given the right conditions.
If consciousness is nothing but a physical process, wouldn’t any machine that behaves like a human be considered as having one? Do you just draw a line in the code and say “That’s where it is”? How complex do you need to make the code before it’s sufficiently sentient?
Thats the problem though. We have no way of knowing if the person we are talking to is actually conscious since everything can be done without consciousness. Moreover, even many of the animals we interact with could be conscious. We dont know.
So until we can judge when a human or other animal is conscious there would be no way to judge if a computer is conscious. My general argument is, if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck, it’s a duck. Better to err in favour of doing the right thing than the wrong.
So yes once we can create an artificial being that appears to be possibly conscious then we should treat it as such.