[ExI] Consciouness and paracrap

Anna Taylor femmechakra at yahoo.ca
Wed Feb 17 03:58:41 UTC 2010


I know I'm simple minded but I don't understand why consciousness is such
a philosophical debate.  I wonder why science sometimes complicates
things.  

Let's say hypothetically I could change the definitions. (This is 
against academic rules but if Gordon GTE's to play master of definitions
why shouldn't I:). Let's say the word conscious meant alive versus
dead. Anything that is conscious is alive and awake.  Could everyone
agree on that? 
The problem lies within determining the levels of consciousness.
Does a worm possess consciousness? Will an AI? 

I'm rather curious as to understand why the scientific community is 
taboo against using the term the "subconscious" as it would be much 
easier to explain if they did. What if the subconscious is Darwin's 
Theory of Evolution?  The basic instinct for survival.  A tree 
requires many things to keep it alive but it doesn't know it.  
It depends on the sun, the earth, the rain and it will continue to 
grow or it will die.  We need trees and they are part of the 
evolutionary process. I would say they are subconsciously alive. 
In humans it's the instinct to take your hand off a hot stove.  
The embedded codes that evolution has installed.  

A person who is under anaesthesia should therefore be conscious and
subconsciously alive. The person requires oxygen, food and water yet 
has no idea. This would then mean that consciousness and awareness 
go hand in hand.  

What if consciousness is to be awake allowing the memories capability 
of recalling, extracting and processing information while awareness is
intelligence, experience and sense?  A worm doesn't live in a
subconscious state, it recalls, extracts and processes information
but does it recall the experience or have a sense as to why it does 
the things it does? Shouldn't this be an underlining question? If we 
knew the worm felt something when we poked it with a knife would we
declare it "aware"?  I know my cat is aware because once he decided to
stick his head too far into a bottle, he never did it again.  I think
to be human is to have awareness as well as consciousness.
 
I believe a strong as well as weak AI will not be conscious or
have any subconscious (well at least until technology merges with
biology then at least that will be a great philosophical discussion)
but only strong AI will have consciousness and somewhat awareness.
What is scary about Strong AI is that it may have the maximum capacity
of intelligence yet have no experience or sense.  We had better hope
that the programmer is fully aware.    

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com 
Sun Dec 13 23:08:02 UTC 2009 questioned gts_2000 at yahoo.com 

>To address the strong AI / weak AI distinction I put to you a 
question you haven't yet answered: what do you think would happen 
if part of your brain, say your visual cortex, were replaced with components that behaved normally in their interaction with the 
remaining biological neurons, but lacked the essential ingredient for
consciousness? 

My observation:
Well my contacts work fine. My memory would recall, extract and process
the information.  If the contacts are too weak and I can't see then 
yes one of my awareness factors would be limited but it would not stop  
me from being conscious or have consciousness. 
 
Btw...Even if all my crazy posts don't amount to anything I have to 
say that the Extropy Chat creates a whirl of imagination.  I can read
something that may lead to me to investigate something truly beneficial 
to my understanding.  Thanks.  Ok back to music...

Anna:)



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