(April 5, 2015 at 10:13 am)Rhythm Wrote: Regarding consciousness? Computational mind. Not my theory, as it were, just the one with which I'm most familiar and the one with which I'm most comfortable. Your number 1 (even if it was a mirror of pixie dust and fairy farts I;d be inclined to say that pixie dust and fairy farts were performing computation). There would still be plenty of questions, plenty of things to wonder about and figure out (probably all the things you're wondering about). Knowing, for example, that we have a comp mind - knowing that alone..being able to establish it - would leave most of the questions regarding mind as unanswered as they were before. There are just a few that comp mind makes meaningless -if true-, is all.
Knowing that a car has an engine which runs on tiny little explosions doesn;t really exhaust the subject of car knowledge either, after all.
If it is what it sounds like it doesn't sound much different from mine. I believe that consciousness is virtual reality software running in the brain. I'm just struggling over the somewhat pedantic question of where the processing takes place. For instance in your framework, when you make a decision is that decision really occurring in the neural networks of your brain and then being presented in your consciousness as a fait accompli albeit with the illusion of it being a free willed choice? That's what I believe because I am a (very) hard determinist. After all some studies show that there is a time delay between the intitiation of an action and our feeling of willing that action. The alternative is that the decision somehow occurs in consciousness and interfaces with the brain - that would be my #2.
