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Consciousness |
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Awareness is a direct effect of the complex hardware and software we contain in our brain. Still, despite its earthly origin, this way of describing awareness – as the monitoring of brain activity by a sub-system of the brain itself – seems to resemble the nearly indescribable sensation which we all know and call “consciousness”. Awareness/Consciousness is measured by how much you let yourself know of your own truth. Consciousness is that property of a system that arises whenever there exists symbols in the system which obey triggering patterns somewhat like the ones described: Human emotions arise indirectly from the organization of our minds, as by-products of its structure, of the way in which they are organized. “falling in love” is a description, which we attach to a complex process of a complex system; there need be no single module inside the system, which is solely responsible for it, however! What about the feelings involved in consciousness? These symbols may trigger each other all they want, but unless someone perceives the whole thing, there is no consciousness. This makes sense to our intuition on some level but it does not make much sense logically. The process of logic itself working internally in the brain may be more analogous to a succession of operations with symbolic pictures, a sort of abstract analogue of events forming a sort of meta - or super – logic with its own rules. At one’s first and simplest attempts to philosophize, one becomes entangled in questions of whether when one knows something, one knows that one knows it, and what, when one is thinking of oneself, is being thought about, and what is doing the thinking. After one has been puzzled and bruised by this problem for a long time, one learns not to press these questions. The concept of a conscious being is, implicitly, realized to be different from that of an unconscious object. In saying that a conscious being knows something, we are saying not only that he knows it, but that he knows that he knows it and that he knows that he knows that he knows it. A “Soulist” would merely assert that the perceiver of all this neural action is the soul, which cannot be described in physical terms and that is that. Soul = deep understanding. Question: Will we understand what intelligence and consciousness and free will and ”I” are when we have made an intelligent computer program? Speculation: Sort of – it all depends on what you mean by "understand”. On a gut level, each of us probably has as good an understanding as is possible of those things to start with. It is like listening to music. Do you really understand Bach because you have taken him apart? Or did you understand it that time you felt the exhilaration in every nerve of your body? Do we understand how the speed of light is constant in every inertial reference frame? We can do the math, but no one in the world has a truly relativistic intuition and probably, no one will ever understand the mysteries of intelligence and consciousness in an intuitive way. Each of us can understand people, only because we have an understanding of ourselves and that is probably about as close as you can come. This is the universal code of understanding, incorporating spirituality, chemistry and awareness. In order to differentiate, associate and separate all this brain activity, one needs to have a mechanism by which we are able to apply logic to any particular situation or circumstance. Enter intelligence! Intelligence The following sentence is false The preceding sentence is true The following sentence is true The preceding sentence is false Which came first, the music or the musician? Essential Abilities for Intelligence: To respond to situations flexibly To take advantage of fortuitous Circumstances To make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages To recognize the relative importance Of different elements of a situation To find similarities between situations Despite differences which may separate them. To draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them. To synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together Imitate, accumulate = AI (Artificial Intelligence) A computer will only do what you have programmed it to do. Innovate = Human Intelligence Descartes: I think therefore I sum! I think therefore I am! |
