RE: Mindfulness or Mindlessness?
September 2, 2021 at 9:32 am
(This post was last modified: September 2, 2021 at 10:02 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Sure, and electric current is only in our test meters.
I'd have to insist again that purple would be a much better example of interpretation in the manner that you're referring to. Purple is a quirk of our organism, not red. That light exists, we're interpreting external data about wavelengths of light. Purple doesn't - we're making it up whole cloth on the basis of data supplied by colorless sensors.
If we're simulating this data for a model, it doesn't have to look like anything in particular, but it does have to look like something. The closer our simulation hews to the external environment, in fact, the more competent any system of control will be. This goes well beyond just color. A mushroom doesn't have to look like a mushroom - once we introduce interpretative simulation....but if mushrooms appeared to us like lions and lions like mushrooms...there would be fewer of us. Similarly, we don't have to perceive our bodily dimensions as they are, but it helps to fit through doors.
Evolutionarily speaking, a consciousness that sees shrooms for lions, lions for shrooms, and cant even accurately model it's body...is a dead end. It's not that it couldn't happen - but that when it does...it ends poorly. There was probably a time when that wasn't the case, fwiw. At the dawn of consciousness, even with a small c, even a little bit of it might have been advantageous - even a (more) wildly inaccurate one. The arms race since makes that moot point for us, today, ofc.
The TLDR version, is that a functionalist sees these things as a representative fascimile, within the limits of the apparatus, of the external environment. Consider this, human beings can't "just see" things even if those things are there exactly..and I mean exactly, as seen. There's no direct pass through. This is the function of a mind, in the minds of functionalists.
-just for clarity, I don't think that anything I'm sharing resolves any and all questions - but I do think that functionalism and scientific theories of consciousness lay to rest a great many objections and questions - as well as the idea that the mystery is quite as large as we might individually imagine - informed..no doubt, by the lack of any such information -in- our apprehension.
Our first machine consciousnesses (if that can be arranged) will probably have a broad range of self diagnostic function. Our little gift to them, lesson learned by hard experience, lol. Not necessary, but necessarily useful.
I'd have to insist again that purple would be a much better example of interpretation in the manner that you're referring to. Purple is a quirk of our organism, not red. That light exists, we're interpreting external data about wavelengths of light. Purple doesn't - we're making it up whole cloth on the basis of data supplied by colorless sensors.
If we're simulating this data for a model, it doesn't have to look like anything in particular, but it does have to look like something. The closer our simulation hews to the external environment, in fact, the more competent any system of control will be. This goes well beyond just color. A mushroom doesn't have to look like a mushroom - once we introduce interpretative simulation....but if mushrooms appeared to us like lions and lions like mushrooms...there would be fewer of us. Similarly, we don't have to perceive our bodily dimensions as they are, but it helps to fit through doors.
Evolutionarily speaking, a consciousness that sees shrooms for lions, lions for shrooms, and cant even accurately model it's body...is a dead end. It's not that it couldn't happen - but that when it does...it ends poorly. There was probably a time when that wasn't the case, fwiw. At the dawn of consciousness, even with a small c, even a little bit of it might have been advantageous - even a (more) wildly inaccurate one. The arms race since makes that moot point for us, today, ofc.
The TLDR version, is that a functionalist sees these things as a representative fascimile, within the limits of the apparatus, of the external environment. Consider this, human beings can't "just see" things even if those things are there exactly..and I mean exactly, as seen. There's no direct pass through. This is the function of a mind, in the minds of functionalists.
-just for clarity, I don't think that anything I'm sharing resolves any and all questions - but I do think that functionalism and scientific theories of consciousness lay to rest a great many objections and questions - as well as the idea that the mystery is quite as large as we might individually imagine - informed..no doubt, by the lack of any such information -in- our apprehension.
Our first machine consciousnesses (if that can be arranged) will probably have a broad range of self diagnostic function. Our little gift to them, lesson learned by hard experience, lol. Not necessary, but necessarily useful.
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