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1 Consciousness
Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.... Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless. (T. Nagel, 1979, pp. 165-166)This approach to understanding sensory qualia is both theoretically and empirically motivated... [;] it suggests an effective means of expressing the allegedly inexpressible. The "ineffable" pink of one's current visual sensation may be richly and precisely expressed as a 95Hz/80Hz/80Hz "chord" in the relevant triune cortical system. The "unconveyable" taste sensation produced by the fabled Australian health tonic Vegamite might be poignantly conveyed as a 85/80/90/15 "chord" in one's four channeled gustatory system.... And the "indescribably" olfactory sensation produced by a newly opened rose might be quite accurately described as a 95/35/10/80/60/55 "chord" in some six-dimensional space within one's olfactory bulb. (P. M. Churchland, 1989, p. 106)One of philosophy's favorite facets of mentality has received scant attention from cognitive psychologists, and that is consciousness itself: fullblown, introspective, inner-world phenomenological consciousness. In fact if one looks in the obvious places... one finds not so much a lack of interest as a deliberate and adroit avoidance of the issue. I think I know why. Consciousness appears to be the last bastion of occult properties, epiphenomena, and immeasurable subjective states-in short, the one area of mind best left to the philosophers, who are welcome to it. Let them make fools of themselves trying to corral the quicksilver of "phenomenology" into a respectable theory. (Dennett, 1978b, p. 149)When I am thinking about anything, my consciousness consists of a number of ideas.... But every idea can be resolved into elements... and these elements are sensations. (Titchener, 1910, p. 33)A Darwin machine now provides a framework for thinking about thought, indeed one that may be a reasonable first approximation to the actual brain machinery underlying thought. An intracerebral Darwin Machine need not try out one sequence at a time against memory; it may be able to try out dozens, if not hundreds, simultaneously, shape up new generations in milliseconds, and thus initiate insightful actions without overt trial and error. This massively parallel selection among stochastic sequences is more analogous to the ways of darwinian biology than to the "von Neumann" serial computer. Which is why I call it a Darwin Machine instead; it shapes up thoughts in milliseconds rather than millennia, and uses innocuous remembered environments rather than noxious real-life ones. It may well create the uniquely human aspect of our consciousness. (Calvin, 1990, pp. 261-262)To suppose the mind to exist in two different states, in the same moment, is a manifest absurdity. To the whole series of states of the mind, then, whatever the individual, momentary successive states may be, I give the name of our consciousness.... There are not sensations, thoughts, passions, and also consciousness, any more than there is quadruped or animal, as a separate being to be added to the wolves, tygers, elephants, and other living creatures.... The fallacy of conceiving consciousness to be something different from the feeling, which is said to be its object, has arisen, in a great measure, from the use of the personal pronoun I. (T. Brown, 1970, p. 336)The human capacity for speech is certainly unique. But the gulf between it and the behavior of animals no longer seems unbridgeable.... What does this leave us with, then, which is characteristically human?.... t resides in the human capacity for consciousness and self-consciousness. (Rose, 1976, p. 177)[Human consciousness] depends wholly on our seeing the outside world in such categories. And the problems of consciousness arise from putting reconstitution beside internalization, from our also being able to see ourselves as if we were objects in the outside world. That is in the very nature of language; it is impossible to have a symbolic system without it.... The Cartesian dualism between mind and body arises directly from this, and so do all the famous paradoxes, both in mathematics and in linguistics.... (Bronowski, 1978, pp. 38-39)It seems to me that there are at least four different viewpoints-or extremes of viewpoint-that one may reasonably hold on the matter [of computation and conscious thinking]:A. All thinking is computation; in particular, feelings of conscious awareness are evoked merely by the carrying out of appropriate computations.B. Awareness is a feature of the brain's physical action; and whereas any physical action can be simulated computationally, computational simulation cannot by itself evoke awareness.C. Appropriate physical action of the brain evokes awareness, but this physical action cannot even be properly simulated computationally.D. Awareness cannot be explained by physical, computational, or any other scientific terms. (Penrose, 1994, p. 12)Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Consciousness
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