SilasBarta comments on Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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Controlled movement does not require consciousness, memory, learning, or prediction. This (simulated) machine has none of those things, yet it walks over uneven terrain and searches for (simulated) food. What controlled movement requires is control.
Memory, learning, and prediction do not require consciousness. Mundane machines and software exist that do all of these things without anyone attributing consciousness to them.
People may think they are conscious of how they move, but they are not. Unless you have studied human physiology, it is unlikely that you can say which of your muscles are exerted in performing any particular movement. People are conscious of muscular action only at a rather high level of abstraction: "pick up a cup" rather than "activate the abductor pollicis brevis". Most of the learning that happens when you learn Tai Chi, yoga, dance, or martial arts, is not accessible to consciousness. There are exercises that you can tell people exactly how to do, and demonstrate in front of them, and yet they will go wrong the first time they try. Then the instructor gives the class a metaphor for the required movement, involving, say, an imaginary lead-weighted diving boot on one foot, and suddenly the students get it. Where is consciousness in that process?
Concurred. I want to point out that Julian Jaynes presents a lot of evidence for the lack of a role for consciousness for these and many other things in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (And yes, I know his general thesis is kind of flaky, but he handles this very narrow topic well.)
One of his examples is how people, under experimental conditions and without even knowing it, adjust muscles that can't be consciously controlled, in order to optimally contain a source of irritation. They never report any conscious recognition of the correlation between that muscle's flexing and the irritation (which was ensured to exist by the experiment, and which irritation they were aware of).