
Where Is My Mind? - brycehalley
http://m.nautil.us/issue/79/catalysts/where-is-my-mind
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visarga
I think trying to essentialise consciousness is a wrong move. Consciousness is
just an advanced strategy employed by self replicators in order to keep on
replicating. It is the result of the environment and competition/cooperation
for resources.

Concretely consciousness is a loop including environment, perception, deciding
on an action and then acting and observing the results. The agent has to fight
against external perturbations and for that it learns the value of various
states and actions. It learns from positive and negative reenforcement.

It feels like something because it has perception (internal and external) and
these sensations hold value because they represent the path towards life.
Agents that don't properly assess the value of the states they are in and
don't select good actions perish, thus only those who act in accordance with
the needs of the body survive. Feeling is just a way to assess the best next
action.

The real magic of consciousness is not just in the brain but in the self
replication abilities of the agent and in the complex challenges presented by
the environment.

~~~
arnoooooo
I think the vedantic approach makes more sense. Can you (or can anyone)
experience something outside of consciousness ? Why assume any such thing
exists if we don't need it to explain our experience ?

In the vedantic approach, matter is not primary : consciousness is, as in our
experience. And consciousness is the only thing there is. Matter is a
representation of what happens in consciousness at large, an interface humans
use. Humans are localised bundles of consciousness, like "whirlpools" in a
"stream of consciousness" if you will.

~~~
visarga
I used to have the vedantic viewpoint. But now I think it has no power, it's
just a convenient explanation. On the other hand evolutionary methods and
reinforcement learning proved they can lead to intelligent behaviour. They can
both explain and produce human like actions, and are much more parsimonious.
They don't require a cosmic consciousness as the source of individual
consciousness, instead they require environment, agent and self replication,
which are concrete things that remain within the laws of physics. AI has
proven how perception, attention, memory, imagination and reward based
learning could be implemented in neural nets.

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chupa-chups
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVFLgx8o7XM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVFLgx8o7XM)

