[HN Gopher] Is Consciousness More Like Chess or the Weather?
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       Is Consciousness More Like Chess or the Weather?
        
       Author : dnetesn
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2023-05-20 11:12 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (nautil.us)
 (TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
        
       | simonh wrote:
       | So he says that he doesn't think consciousness is computational,
       | but in the rest of the article pretty much everything he says
       | about it is in terms of processing information.
       | 
       | " In fact, the brain is always making predictions about what's
       | out there in the world or in the body. And using sensory signals
       | to update those predictions. What we consciously experience is
       | not a readout of the sensory data in a kind of outside-in
       | direction. It's the predictions themselves. It's the brain's best
       | guess of what's going on."
       | 
       | So, processing information, then.
       | 
       | " I argue that this entails that the brain is or has a predictive
       | model of its own body, because prediction is very good for
       | regulation."
       | 
       | Sounds like information processing to me.
       | 
       | " A conscious experience, typically for us humans, brings
       | together a large amount of information about the world, from many
       | different modalities at once--sight, sound, touch, taste, smell--
       | in a single unified scene that immediately makes apparent what
       | the organism should do next. That's the primary function of
       | consciousness--to guide the motivated behavior of the organism
       | that maximizes its chances of staying alive."
       | 
       | Do I have to say it again? Every single function he ascribes to
       | consciousness consists or receiving and processing information,
       | and making decisions.
       | 
       | We know the answer to this. Any Turing complete system is capable
       | in principle of any information processing task. Whatever else
       | brains are, we know they are information processing systems.
       | Perceptions go in, and decisions come out. All of our conscious
       | experience is of information. Feelings, sensations, emotions,
       | decisions, they're all information. I really don't understand why
       | this seems to be so hard for people to grasp.
        
       | furyofantares wrote:
       | * * *
        
       | InDemoVeritas wrote:
       | Clouds are thoughts in the mind of the sky.
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-21 23:00 UTC)