🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct1.220055.20934@kurango.cit.gu.edu.au>, tjdavis@kurango.cit.gu.edu.au (Tim Davis) writes:
|> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
|> 
|> >In article <1992Sep30.010007.21214@leland.Stanford.EDU> ledwards@leland.Stanford.EDU (Laurence James Edwards) writes:
|> 
|> >>Second, it
|> >>seems advantageous to be conscious of pain (i.e. be able to think about it)
|> >>so that one can figure out why one is in pain. That way one can avoid similar
|> >>situations in the future, or one can choose to ignore the pain if the
|> >>situation requires. 
|> 
|> >There are chess programs which manage to figure out why they are in
|> >check, can learen how to avoid it in future, put up with it if
|> >neceessary for some greater purpose, etc., all without needing to be
|> >conscious of being in check. 
|> >-- 
|> 
|> I am somewhat confused by the second comment.  If in fact the chess
|> programs have no need to be conscious of being in check then what is
|> 'it' that they are trying 'to figure out why they are in', what is 'it'
|> they will 'put up with if necessary for some greater purpose'?  The
|> game must be conscious of 'something' in order to develop these other
|> tendencies.

Yes, good point. What is the test for consciousness? Consciousness
is "awareness" of self and environment. What working definition
of awareness can we use? Is it just that the entity in question must have a
particular state associated with all stimuli it recieves? How complete
must this awareness be? If I am only "aware" of a single cell in my body
am I conscious? If something is aware of its environment but not of itself
is it conscious? How about if it is aware of itself but not of its envirnment?

Does consciousness require that one part of a brain/state-machine be
independent and aware of another part? If this is the case then I would think
that this awareness would have to be "non-deterministic" otherwise we could just
consider the 2 pieces as one. That is, the state of the monitor must be at
times be independent of the monitored part but at other times dependent on it.

So many questions, so few answers...

On a slightly different subject, if one were to continuously wear stereo LCD
goggles that switched say red and blue would one eventually experience blue as
red?

Larry Edwards