(September 21, 2016 at 10:14 am)ChadWooters Wrote:(September 20, 2016 at 11:35 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I can see how a certain algorithm would BEHAVE as a conscious agent. What I can't see is how it would BECOME a conscious agent.
I think Jor is saying that they don't actually become conscious agents.They think they think but they don't. They don't actually feel the feelings they feel. She turns Chalmers's thought problem on its head by saying that ours already is the zombie world.
That would be largely correct, though I might disagree with some of the wording. People want to give consciousness this ontological status as 'a thing' that is more than just stuff happening in the brain. If consciousness exists in the brain as a property of classically behaving neurons, then at some level it is just 'stuff happening'. There is no conflict between consciousness and stuff happening because consciousness is just stuff happening. My model, if valid, explains how stuff happening takes on the appearance of consciousness as a thing. We feel that a Cartesian theater exists in our head because our brains are manipulating a model that is, essentially, the Cartesian theater. Just as our brain creates a model of the visual world that is filled with 3D objects, and no blind spot, Consciousness is a model that the brain constructs. You might ask "Who is the model constructed for?" It isn't constructed for anybody. It has inputs (sensory data and language) and outputs (images to sensory systems, language, body behavior), but it also has a set of 'created' parameters--these are what make up the structure of the Cartesian theater, it is imagined as a thing, unified, existing in the now, which 'owns' the body and the various outputs. I think the fact that this model includes control of the language center as well as input from the language center gives substance to the illusion that consciousness is a space where thoughts happen. This is a feedback loop, and there's one for visual images as well. I suspect that imagining things 'in our head' is using the visual centers in output mode. The images are constructed using what is normally thought of as an input only system. Rather than being input only, our sensory systems can be driven to create phantom images--an image of visual things, an image of a body which we 'own', and so on. It is these phantom images, constructed in a structured model that gives the illusion of consciousness. (Okay, my model needs a little work, but that's basically it.)