[extropy-chat] Consciousness vs. awareness [was: I keep asking myself...]

Fri Apr 7 15:28:54 UTC 2006

The recent conversations regarding sentience, consciousness and intelligence
have caused me to become more aware of a distinction that I make (to a large
extent automatically) which many other people do not make and which may in
part explain why I am reviled by some list members.

Let us define a hierarchy...
1. Sentient (has a nervous system and senses physical pain)
2. Conscious (in the sense that they 'believe' that they have free will)
3. Self-aware (in the sense that they run their own mind and their mind does
not run them)

Now, orthogonal to these is "intelligence", which I will classify as
information processing capacity and abilities.  Obviously a nematode is
"sentient" because it has a nervous system and can be induced to respond to
stimuli in ways that would be considered a "pain" response.  But a nematode
doesn't have very many neurons and they are organized very primitively -- so
it isn't very intelligent.  In contrast Kasparov has lots of neurons and a
huge bunch of them have been trained to recognize a variety of chess board
positions and draw conclusions about their attractiveness.  At some point in
the design and organization of a crystallized brain state "consciousness"
can emerge -- for example I suspect many people would consider that their
pet (adult) dog has significantly more consciousness than a newborn human
baby -- even though the baby has significantly more neurons at its
disposal.  I suspect what we label "consciousness" emerges as a result of
developing the capabilities and strategies for fulfilling needs or wants (
i.e. goal seeking behavior that involves selecting between choices).

Now, self-awareness, aka 'enlightenment', is a somewhat more ethereal
quality.  In my opinion it is the fundamental shift from ones mind running
you to you running your mind.  It is a shift from the memes running you to
you running the memes.  Many people may be self-aware when they think about
specific problems, particularly those which are novel, but they are not
generally (universally?) self-aware.

Self-awareness may develop naturally but I doubt it happens often.  I
suspect it can happen if one is trained in debating where one is asked to
justify one position and then to reverse oneself and argue the opposite
position just as well.  It can be developed when one follows particular
disciplines such as Zen [1].  I know that for myself it happened as a result
of taking the EST seminars [2] in the late 1970s.  Those seminars were
structured so as to allow people to get to the point where they can
disassociate their experiences and thoughts from their "self".   I.e. *you*
are not *the* thoughts, *you* are the container for, and should you choose
to be, the agent for, those thoughts.  This was called "getting it" back
then.  It generally resulted in a large number of people ROTFL at the end of
the 4th day (the revelation that one had been living ones life as an unaware
meme execution agent can be quite humorous).  Some people left the seminar
wondering if the "got it".  They may have already had it (though I doubt
this was true very often) -- some "got it" later -- some never "got it".

The development of an understanding of self-awareness is not something new.
Zen has developed and been taught for thousands of years.  Elements of this
perspective can also be found in the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky
[3,4].  And of course aspects of self-awareness and rational thought have
been elements of everything from Rand's Objectivism to Hubbard's Dianetics
[5].

But IMO there is a critical distinction between those who are self-aware and
those who are merely conscious.  As I view it as highly improbable that
those who are enmeshed in religious meme sets whose primary raison d'etre is
the endless repetition and replication of ideas which range from highly
outdated to completely wrong will magically become self-aware and extract
themselves from their fantasy realities.  I have no problem classifying them
as "children of a lesser god".

Subscribing to the idea that sentience or consciousness (or being "human")
grants rights (to be free of pain, to exercise free will, etc.) runs into
the hurdles of where do you want to go and how do you want to get there.  As
a "true" extropian, I believe "Its the information stupid!"  The
un-self-aware pursuit of making endless copies of information (be it copies
of the human genome or copies of specific meme sets) is rather pointless
once the basic information set is sufficiently redundant that its
probability of destruction is very low.  In my mind one bowl of jello is
very similar to another bowl of jello unless one bowl of jello behaves in a
way that produces new, and hopefully more complex, bowl of Super-jello.

Being born in the United States, particularly in Massachusetts, one learns
very early about the "unalienable" rights such as "life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness".  However, being somewhat enlightened now I can ask
whether this perspective is indeed true or even whether it is useful at this
point in time?

An extropic perspective, at least *my* extropic perspective (somewhat biased
by a background in computer science) would want to know whether or not the
bowl of jello contained any unique, potentially useful, information?  If so
I would want it to be preserved, perhaps in some compressed form.  If the
information can be truly "productive" then it should be supplied with
resources to mutate, create, replicate, etc.  If not then it should perhaps
be put out in the compost heap where its resources could used to facilitate
more mutation and selection, albeit by more primitive organisms.

As a self-aware person I would hope that if other self-aware people
determine that I am not a productive use of the resources involved in being
"me" that they would at least would make a copy or two of the information I
contain before returning me to the compost heap.

There are a couple of things which come out of this perspective.  A highly
self-aware person realizes that there isn't really any such thing as "pain"
-- physical or emotional -- there is simply a choice to experience a set of
sensations (eletrochemical phenomena) as something we label as "painful".
(Don't think that I don't feel pain like anyone else -- I do.  However I
*know* that I have choices about how I choose to experience that pain.)  So
perhaps it should be considered immoral or evil to inflict "pain" upon
organisms which are incapable of choosing how that pain is experienced.
This position only stands if it lacks a greater context of the relative
value or benefit which may be derived from the pain (witness "no pain no
gain").

Now, I suspect when we are hitting the resource limits of the planet and the
time comes to send in the nanorobots in to harvest the silicon contained in
the Kaaba [6] in Mecca that there may still be around a fairly large number
of non-enlightened people who would perceive this as "painful" and most
likely would seek to kill those responsible for this (of course its kind of
hard to "kill" distributed replicated uploads so the natural fear of
retribution which might hold one back from this action now will be of
significantly less concern in the future).  The question for the enlightened
then becomes how one handles this nonproductive use of resources (in silicon
in the Kaaba or in carbon in unaware meme replicators) in the long term.
Perhaps we should prohibit the use of life-extension technologies by those
who are unenlightened and simply wait until they all die.

Robert

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Seminars_Training
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._I._Gurdjieff
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_D_Ouspensky
5. http://www.holysmoke.org/cos/ayn-rand-and-hubbard.htm
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaaba
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