[ExI] Flash of insight...

[Alan Grimes]

> Well,... in that thread I noticed something odd.  Everyone was talking
> about consciousness, but despite each of us having a lifetime of
> experience being conscious -- subjective experience to be sure, but
> that's hardly an excuse for ignoring the data set -- no one was
> describing the details of consciousness as they experienced it.  I
> wondered why.  I guessed -- but I'm not married to the notion -- that
> maybe folks are hesitant to talk about their inner life.  Why?
> Perhaps because it's so over-the-top whacky that no one wants to run
> the risk -- social, professional, ego stability, whatever -- of
> fessing up.

> Now Alan asks the question straight up.

> Okay, here's the deal.  I have a flippin' raft of personalities inside
> my head.  So much so that I have been trying to figure out how to
> reconcile them with a model of consciousness.  I've used  the term
> "personalities" above, but shift over to "consciousness" below.  I use
> the two interchangeably.  A "consciousness" is, in the context of my
> ongoing attempt to make order out of this business, a personality or
> persona.  Try substituting "persona" for "consciousness" below, and
> see how it feels.

> There's the speaking consciousness, the hearing consciousness, the
> seeing consciousness, the tactile consciousness, (presumably "tasting"
> and smelling consciousnesses (powerful but "quiet").   I see these as
> neocortical-to-sensory-organs-and-related-tissues modules, engaged in
> a continuous periodic back-and-forth signaling paradigm.

If your self-perceptions are accurate, you have a type of ESP for seeing
your mental states!

In the ancestral environment, this was probably maladaptive because the
evolutionary environment required that a mind spend as much attention as
possible on its environment and as little as possible on it's own
internal state. So for most of us (probably 80%), it is probably the
case that we are blind to this part of ourselves.

However, now, and in the future, this kind of self-perception could be
considered a super power. First it makes you uniquely qualified to work
on AI because you have a deeper level of perception of how your own mind
works. (I have to rely on book learning and inference).

Furthermore, with neural interfacing, you will require the ability to
"see" and manipulate the parts of your mind so that you can organize
your own consciousness across a diversity of platforms.

The robot I plan to program in a few years will require this ability
too! -- Heck, I want the ability now cuz of the aforementioned benefits.
-- Even better the ability to turn it on and off as the need arises.

It will take a great deal of research, however, to figure out exactly
what is going on here. =\ Definitely worth it though...

-- 
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