To be a car; a machine at a minimum must have wheels. Wheels are not sufficient to make a machine into a car.

To be conscious, an entity must be self-aware of self-consciousness. To be self-aware of self-consciousness an entity must have a "self-consciousness-detector" A self-consciousness-detector requires data and computation resources to do the pattern recognition necessary to detect self-consciousness.

What else consciousness requires I don't know, but I know it must require detection of self-consciousness.

My purpose in pointing this out was to say that yes, people today are making the same types of category errors as Kelvin was; the mistaken belief that some types of objects are fundamentally not comparable (in Kelvin's case living things and machines), in the example I used computations by a sensory neural network and computations by a machine pattern recognition system.

They are both doing computations, they can both be compared as computing devices; they both need computation resources to accomplish the computations and data to do the computations on.

For either of them to detect something they both need both data and computation resources. Even when the thing being detected is consciousness. Why there is the need/desire to keep “consciousness” as a special category of things/objects for which the normal rules of sensory detection do not apply, is not something I understand.

My experience has always been that if you look hard enough for errors you will find them. If someone wants to look for trivial errors and so discount whatever is present that is not trivial error, then discussions of difficult problems becomes impossible.

My motivation for my original post was not to do battle, but to discuss the computational requirements of consciousness and consciousness detection. If that is such a hot-button topic that people feel the need to attack me, my arguments, my ineptness at text formatting, pile on, and vote my karma down to oblivion, then perhaps LW is not ready to discuss such things and I should move it to my blog.

Is there something wrong with my interpretation of Stockholm Syndrome other than it is not the “natural interpretation"? Is it inconsistent with anything known about Stockholm Syndrome, how people interact, or how humans evolved?

Would we consider it surprising if humans did have a mechanism to try and emulate a “green beard” if having a green beard became essential for survival?

We know that some people find many green-beard-type reasons for attacking and even killing other humans. Race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and so on are all reasons for hating and even killing other humans. How do the victims prevent themselves from being victimized? Usually by obscuring their identity, by attempting to display the “green beard” the absence of which brings attack.

Stockholm Syndrome happens in a short period of time, so it is easier to study than the “poser” habits that occur over a lifetime. Is it fundamentally different, or is it just one point on a spectrum?

Yes, and some people today don't realize that the brain does computations on sensory input in order to accomplish pattern recognition, and without that computation there is no pattern recognition and no perception. Of anything.

I had read mysterious answers to mysterious questions. I think I do have an explanation that makes consciousness seem less mysterious and which does not introduce any additional mysteries. Unfortunately I seem to be the only one who appreciates that.

Maybe if I had started out to discuss the computational requirements of the perception of consciousness there would have been less objection. But I don't see any way to differentiate between perception of consciousness and consciousness. I don't think you can have one without the other.

nawitus, my post was too long as it is. If I had included multiple discussions of multiple definitions of consciousness and qualia, you would either still be reading it or would have stopped because it was too long.

With all due respect to Lord Kelvin, he personally knew of heavier than air flying machines. We now call them birds. He called them birds too.

We can't “know for sure” because consciousness is a subjective experience. The only way you could “know for sure” would be if you simulated an entity and so knew from how you put the simulation together that the entity you were simulating did experience self-consciousness.

So how does this hypothetical biologist calibrate his consciousness scanner? Calibrate it so that he “knows for sure” that it is reading consciousness correctly? His degree of certainty in the output of his consciousness scanner is limited by his degree of certainty in his calibration standards. Even if it worked perfectly.

In order to be aware of something, you need to detect something. To detect something you need to receive sensory data and then process that data via pattern recognition into detection or not detection.

To detect consciousness your hypothetical biologist needs a “consciousness scanner”. So does any would-be detector of any consciousness. That “consciousness scanner” has to have certain properties whether it is instantiated in electronics or in meat. Those properties include receipt of sufficient data and then pattern recognition on that data to determine a detection or a not detection. That pattern recognition will be subject to type 1 errors and type 2 errors.

I am talking about minimum requirements, not sufficient requirements.

I am not sure what you mean by "understand relevant features of its own source code".

I don't know any humans that I would consider conscious that don't fit the definition of consciousness that I am using. If you have a different definition I would be happy to consider it.

Yvain, what I mean by illusion is:

perceptions not corresponding to objective reality due to defects in sensory information processing used as the basis for that perception.

Optical illusions are examples of perceptions that don't correspond to reality because of how our nervous system processes light signals. Errors in perception; either false positives or false negatives are illusions.

In some of the meditative traditions there is the goal of "losing the self". I have never studied those traditions and don't know much about them. I do know about dissociation from PTSD.

There can be entities that are not self-aware. I think that most animals that don't recognize themselves in a mirror fit in the category of not recognizing themselves as entities. That was not the focus of what I wanted to talk about.

To be self-aware, an entity must have an entity detector that registers “self” upon exposure to certain stimuli.

Some animals do recognize other entities but don't recognize themselves as “self”. They perceive another entity in a mirror, not themselves.