Comment on Consciousness

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 02:01:33 GMT

I thought of linking, but I wanted a fresh start, something self-contained. It's a debatable choice. What I really wish is that when I posted this two days ago, I'd thought of creating in advance a thread for each major question. It will be difficult to migrate the discussion there now, but I would like to try.

Responding briefly:

1) I think "where is color?" and "where is chess?" are just different sorts of questions. The latter is an instance of "where is meaning?" or "where is computation?". Because meaning and computation can be imputed to symbols and artefacts by convention, the where-is-chess discussion needs to keep the human original in view as well. A systematic answer should first say where is chess when humans play each other. Then we can talk about chess computers playing each other, and whether that situation contains chess only by convention, or intrinsically, or whether machine chess is a mixture of intrinsic and attributed meaning and computation.

2) If you wish to speak of there being symbols in the brain, again, you have to take a position on computation and meaning. Then, if you've managed to identify an actual physical thing or property which you think can be called a symbol, then you need to explain how to get color out of that particular physical thing.

Discuss