In Zombies! Zombies? Eliezer mentions that one aspect of consciousness is that it can causally affect the real world, e.g. cause you to say "I feel conscious right now", or result in me typing out these words.
Even if a generally accepted mechanism of consciousness has not been found yet are there any tentative explanations for this "can change world" property? Googling around I was unable to find anything (although Zombies are certainly popular).
I had an idea of how this might work, but just wanted to see if it was worth the effort of writing.
Hrm? In the ordinary physical world, we can talk perfectly well about the interval in which an object is falling -- it's the period in which it's moving downward as a result of gravity. And likewise it's possible to say "the building started burning at time t, and was on fire until time t1, at which point it smouldered until t2". If you think chemical or positional change requires time, we can do the usual move of asking about "the small interval of time around t."
The thing that confuses me is that it seems like we have two conflicting desires or intuitions:
To say that consciousness is a property of minds, which is to say, of programs.
We also want to talk about consciousness as though it's an ordinary physical state, like "walking", or "digesting" -- the property starts (possibly gradually), continues for a period, and then fades out. It seems naturally to say "I become conscious when I wake up in the morning, and then am conscious until night-time when I go to sleep.
And the problem is that our intuitions for physical processes and time don't match with what we know how to define about programs. There's no formal way to talk about "the program is executing at time t"; that's an implementational detail that isn't an intrinsic property of the program or even of the program's execution history.
I am indeed suggesting we adopt a definition of consciousness that only applies to the physical embodiment of a mind. The advantage of this definition is that it captures all the conventional uses of the term in everyday life, without forcing us to deal with definitional puzzles in other contexts.
As a rough example of such a definition: "Consciousness is the property of noticing changes over time in one's mental state or beliefs."
Ah, I think I understand your position better now. Thanks for clarifying.
So, OK... if I understand you correctly, you're saying that when a building is burning, we can formally describe that process as a property of the building, but when a program is executing, that isn't a property of the program, but rather of the system executing the program, such as a brain.
And therefore you want to talk about consciousness as a property of program-executors (physical embodiments of minds) rather than of programs themselves.
Yes? Have I got that more or less right?
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