Seeing red

[emjay]

Yes, that's correct. In my current world view, mental phenomena are both redundant and unnecessary... and only mirror/represent the underlying system activity but do not influence it ... so we may as well be philosophical zombies, and the puzzle is why we're not.

This is the essence of this thread, and the mind-body problem, for sure.  Well put.

If you are going to have a side-effect, consciousness is a pretty amazing one to have.  I mean, we're talking Pinocchio, here.  Not only that, but it is a seemingly extra property that arises with no apparent loss of efficiency.

It is for this reason that I think IF the universe is material, matter must have a conscious component.  Otherwise, it's as though a new dimension has supervened on a system just because it is processing information.

Thank you And agreed, certainly a pretty amazing side effect to have, though it can be both a gift and a curse... but mainly a gift

I was just pondering something when I saw your post, so I thought I may as well put those thoughts in my reply to you, rather than a separate post, because they are relevant to what you're saying. It's now 11am for me and I still haven't slept, so I'm probably on your time now, assuming you're American. Isn't it strange that you do your best thinking - or I do - about these things... philosophical zombies etc... when you essentially are a zombie That's certainly how I feel at the moment.

Anyway I was thinking about philosophical zombies, and yes, I do believe that there would be absolutely no difference in the world if no-one experienced qualia of any kind. The world would be exactly as it is... people would still talk, watch TV, appreciate art, act with compassion, or not. Civilisation would still exist and all it's advances. All the processing that consciousness mirrors phenomenally would still go on under the hood arriving at all the same conclusions, just not perceived, only represented neurally.

But thinking about it like that made me think of something. Is there anything, at all, that could show that consciousness provides extra information to the system? In consciousness, anything we can focus on we can name, and anything we can name we must be able to associate with that name. But in our unique human consciousness we can not only notice what appears to be 'out there' but also our own apparatus for perceiving it... ie we can notice something we see but also notice the visual field in which we see it. So in order to associate a name with something it has to have a neural representation. So for my neural network theories to be true (not thinking about comp mind at the moment, but just neural networks and the 'differentiating' theory I put forward earlier) it must be the case that everything we can notice in consciousness - including all the qualia itself - has to have a neural representation that can be associated with. If it does not... if there's any aspect of qualia that could be entered into the system literally by word of mouth but does not have a neural representation, then I would concede defeat and probably accept some form of dualism. And given that a neuron is a malleable detector that learns and makes itself a better detector of whatever it detects, can detect anything that is prepared to synapse with it, and the brain itself is plastic so the 'wiring' is not fixed, it makes me wonder how deep these connections go. It makes me wonder what connectivity is required for a neural network to become self-aware. A neural network is self-organising... it will learn to detect whatever patterns there are to detect... so if there is a pattern that represents the visual field as a 'meta-thing', I see no reason why another neuron (saying singular for simplicity) could pick up on that and become a specialised visual field detector, which is then associable throughout the network as a representation. So that's how I now think it happens - self-awareness in the network - and I'm gonna have a lot of fun exploring this possibility

So after all that, to address your final point, I'm now even more convinced by the integrating/differentiating theory I put forward earlier, so I would have to opt for the latter of your two suggestions, but I can't rule out the former either I'm so excited (but still a zombie - so if I sound stoned or something, just put it down to that ) - there's nothing more fun than neural network theorising Well okay, there are a few things