wedrifid comments on Link: PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness (Peter Watts) - Less Wrong

9 Post author: JulianMorrison 11 October 2009 09:51PM

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Comment author: wedrifid 12 October 2009 10:41:52AM 2 points [-]

What’s the primitive, bare-bones, nuts-and-bolts thing that consciousness does once we’ve stripped away all the self-aggrandizing bombast?

I suggest 'self-aggrandizing bombast' is a closer match to that which we refer to as consciousness than motor command mediation.

Comment author: JulianMorrison 12 October 2009 12:58:26PM 1 point [-]

The problem is that the "conscious mind" takes exaggerated credit for a whole lot of stuff it barely intervenes to mediate and certainly doesn't micromanage (everything from picking up a cup of coffee to driving to work) and pretends away the huge workload of stuff it isn't involved in (visual processing, body language interpretation, language, etc).

When you strip out the conscious mind's delusions of command, it gets a lot harder to see what it's useful for. Hence the paper.