ohhh ooohhh ooohhh! uh... it's necessary for freewill?
(You know; so God doesn't have boring "automatons" praying to him!)
No, he just wants coereced ones.
Two separate questions: "How?" and "Why?"
I think the "Why?" question will be answered when we can show how the appearance of consciousness was survival-enhancing for our evolutionary ancestors.
The current "hard problem" is "How?" How do electro-chemical processes in the brain give rise to (generate) subjectivity, the "experience of what it is like"?
I've been coerced to share this awesome link (in robot voice)...
view linkThis is about a team that is developing a supercomputer model of the brain (mind) which is designed to test the idea that we generate our own reality. I'm gonna post this in DeepT too.
ooo ooo, MisterS. You didn't answer the question. You did an end run, and avoided it altogether.
Marti,
How would Lyotard answer this?
Actually, Richard, I think Lyotard would view all this as an attempt to replace one "meta-narrative" with another.
I don't agree with you, Search, that the hard question is How. It's a matter of wiring and will be eventually figured out.
But the why ... why do these physical processes create a consciousness? And why do we need consciousness for survival? Buttercups do quite well without it.
Do you think cockroaches have consciousness?
Cockroaches obviously have an "input/output" circuit--information from the environment "goes in", gets processed, and modifies behavior (output). So, it depends on what is meant by "conscious" and how one distinguishes conciousness from self-consciousness. In one sense, we could say that a cockroach is "aware" of its environment. But, I think, that could simply be a behavioristist conception of consciousness.
Like a lot of highfalutin philosophic questions, this "smells like" a loaded question or circular reasoning or whatever. First of all we can't be sure that anyone else is conscious. The Behaviorist would say this is irrelevant. Which is probably true. Consciousness or self-consciousness may be nothing more than a program watching (perceiving) another program, or the same program. This is all occurring in the "Meat-Computer" we discussed earlier in this group.
I have noticed that over the years I have come to realize that many things that don't feel true are true nevertheless.
So, Richard, you doubt that your friends and family are conscious beings? (Note I didn't say "intelligent beings")