(February 16, 2017 at 5:05 pm)bennyboy Wrote:(February 16, 2017 at 12:57 pm)emjay Wrote: And since it's by no means certain even that 'I' exist as I subjectively infer I do. . .
eh? Who's doing the inferring?
I was just expressing my own confusions; if you want to believe in a homunculous, knock yourself out, but for me it's not a given... all that's given is there's an apparent homunculous. That apparent homunculous is the subject of experience, ie if there is experience there is something to experience it... apparently... but that focal point, of which our senses revolve around, could, in my view, be just another implicit representation in the network, not above and beyond, as a homunculous would be, but the natural inference the network would make when it finds all sensory information, pointing as it were to the same thing. Even if that 'thing' doesn't exist, the network would still create an inferred representation for it, which is what I think it is, just as it does for the inferred essences of any other objects. In other words a neural stereotype; stereotypes are an NN's bread and butter... finding and representing the common features of something... so in my opinion it's not that big of a leap to think that the ultimate stereotype in the brain could be the self. As far as I'm concerned that's far less of a leap than to think that the self is a separate system... like a black box... different from the network that feeds into it. So in answer to your question in my opinion it's not a question of who's doing the inferring, but what, and the answer I'd give is it's the network. And you already know how I see the mind... with neural active representations and phenomenal active representations being two sides of the same coin, so that view includes the activation of that self stereotype whenever I am experiencing, just by definition.
