
Consciousness: Where Are Words? - Hooke
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/27/consciousness-where-are-words/
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bra-ket
the author's Phd thesis "Intentional robots ", 2007:

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Riccardo_Manzotti/publi...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Riccardo_Manzotti/publication/242281589_Intentional_robots_The_design_of_a_goal-
seeking_environment-driven_agent/links/004635341619b9bc1c000000/Intentional-
robots-The-design-of-a-goal-seeking-environment-driven-agent.pdf)

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ozy
Meaning and subjectivity come from (machine) learning, or relativity as
Riccardo calls it.

I think, consciousness from how our brains learn, namely by having
internalized the feedback. Which is another way of saying by modeling the
world, and updating those models by constantly monitoring the effectiveness of
those models.

We are self-observers, integrating our sensory information into a subjective
first-person perspective.

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kaffeemitsahne
Riccardo Manzotti's website:

[http://www.consciousness.it/](http://www.consciousness.it/)

~~~
szemet
[http://www.thespreadmind.com/The_Spread_Mind_S7.php](http://www.thespreadmind.com/The_Spread_Mind_S7.php)

This is obviously false to me.*

If a robot vacuum recognizes a roadblock and stops, its inner representation
of the roadblock is not merely an agreement (with whom anyway?).

That representation is internal and (normally) only accessible to the software
of that particular robot (it may even could change over time - of course it
would be a bad programming practice except for malwares - so no agreement is
needed but only some kind of behavioral self consistency). And it have real
causal power: it makes the robot stop and turn.

That representation is stored in memory cells wich are (usually in a normal
household) not roadblocks.

*(AFAIK this viewpoint is called functionalism. It just somehow feels natural to me as a developer, but maybe it is just taste, and it is just as twisted for a philosopher as the above identity theory for me...)

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ibigb
For a better understanding of consciousness, thinking, knowledge, I would
refer you to a short thesis correcting some of the errors of ideas about same:
[http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA003/English/GC1981/GA003_c03...](http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA003/English/GC1981/GA003_c03.html)

"ALL PROPOUNDERS of theories of knowledge since Kant have been influenced to a
greater or lesser degree by the mistaken way he formulated the problem of
knowledge. As a result of his “a priorism” he advanced the view that all
objects given to us are our representations..."

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empath75
I'm 3 sentences into the interview, and this seems absurd on its face. Does
anyone take this seriously?

"When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal
relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see
what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to
a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to
exert an effect in the present, in various combinations."

~~~
vinceguidry
I had the same reaction, but you have to keep reading. He's building a stack.
He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's
that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of
language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory
representations of them. There's no reason to start constructing the abstract
objects yet, we're not at that layer of the 'stack'.

It's kind of like saying that when you dive down to the network layer, video
doesn't exist. It's up to the application running the network to assemble all
the packets to turn it into video.

Thoughts are constructed from the stream of physical experiences that get
formed into words, not the other way around. It's perfectly possible for the
brain to still operate without thoughts the way we experience them, in fact,
deaf people think visually rather than auditorially like most of us do.

~~~
empath75
I think it’s obvious that brains can operate without thoughts because animals
and insects do it.

~~~
kleer001
What makes you think other living beings besides humans don't have thoughts?
IMHO we're just a slightly souped up version of everything else, exist along a
continuity, and are not 'special' except in contrived and technical ways.

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catawbasam
'slightly' seems a bit understated to me. There is no other species whose
members are anywhere close to sitting around typing messages to each other
across hundreds or thousand of miles.

We are steering our evolution as a species outside of biology, in large part,
via social and cultural institutions. What other species does that?

~~~
StavrosK
> What other species does that?

None. Sometimes I wonder if they know something we don't.

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EGreg
How about this question:

What is consciousness?

What is existence?

They seem to be duals of each other.

I have found that, if you are careful to state the subject and object of a
sentence, then it's really hard to pose any question that doesn't have a
trivial and obvious answer.

TRY IT!

So could many of these things just be an artifact of language?

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jjaredsimpson
Consciousness is: what it is like to experience something. Note this is
different from self consciousness which is: what is it like to be something
which experiences and know you are that thing.

Humans are certainly self conscious. Crabs are certainly conscious. Crystals
certainly exist.

Where the boundaries are is an interesting question, but the categories
certainly exist even if I can't draw a clean boundary around members.

~~~
EGreg
Let's translate your sentences to illustrate what I mean.

What it is _like_? So you are comparing one entity experiencing something to
another. Experiencing is a process that takes place inside the entity and
among its component parts.

 _Know you are that thing_ \- every thing is itself, if it has well defined
boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and
good reasons to believe it to be correct. Here we have a tautology - that a
thing is itself - so it doesn't require much to know that. What you are
probably more interested in is a mechanism that can take advantge of that
knowledge in various ways. Like self preservation.

Humans are self conscious.

Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self
preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them.

Crystals do not have this knowledge or do not have a mechanism to act on it in
a way that manipulates semantic symbols.

~~~
guuz
> Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self
> preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them.

It's a bit more complicated. Self consciousness is the ability to
_contemplate_ mental states, some philosophers say. Crabs do not contemplate
their own mental states, they simply act and feel.

~~~
EGreg
Ok well there you go. I was basing it on your earlier definition.

So define the word _contemplate_.

But do you see how defining things and using the subject and object makes it
hard to ask any of the major questions?

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mannykannot
Guuz's comment does not change the earlier definition (regardless of who
stated it.) What it does do is point out a flaw in your argument from that
definition to your claim that crabs are self-conscious.

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EGreg
_what is it like to be something which experiences and know you are that
thing._

According to this definition, crabs are self conscious.

~~~
mannykannot
As this is one of several places where you have asserted the same claim, one
response is sufficient:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16041077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16041077)

