[grabbalacious]

My argument against panpsychism (the principled form of animism, which is ancient) is that to perceive something you have to have a representation of it in memory. Ergo if you don't have a memory system you can't be conscious of anything. Rocks don't have RAM.

[andrewflnr]

You could quite reasonably consider an excited electron to be a 1-bit memory of experiencing a photon recently. My understanding of panpsychism is that it doesn't require everything to have an equally sophisticated consciousness/experience as ours, just some. And sure, an excited electron decays, but so do your memory and bits in RAM.

[grabbalacious]

Well I suspect a memory system, together with stable input/output hardware, are necessary but not sufficient. To be a conscious agent, said agent's memory must include a representation of itself. Otherwise it can't truthfully say, "I see a pebble."

Edit: it can't truthfully think, "I see a pebble."

[odyssey7]

When I think about my first-person experience, it's something that happens in the present instant. The awareness of a distant and recent past may simply be a result of memory stimuli being presented by the brain to the consciousness at the present instant.

In this model, if I went under anesthesia and the King Particle got knocked out of its orbit and got replaced by another, the new consciousness would believe it was a continuation of the earlier one, because it would receive the same stimuli that its predecessor would have, and part of that stimuli was evolved to elicit a sensation for the continuity of self.

What this gets at is, is consciousness stateless? Is its experience a pure function of what is fed into it, or is it stateful?

[babygoat]

Animals don’t have RAM either. An understanding of organic memory systems has never been established.

[grabbalacious]

You're quite right. That last sentence was intended to be a catchy and rhetorical summary.

[FreeHugs]

    to perceive something you have to
    have a representation of it in memory

Why? I cannot think of a definition of "perceive" that would lead to this conclusion.

[grabbalacious]

You have to learn to see stuff, or recognise sounds, for example.

[FreeHugs]

That might be your definition of conciousness. That a system has to match input to something it holds in ram to be conscious. But I don't think it is shared by many.

Is a computer running voice recognicion software a conscious being in your book?

[grabbalacious]

Well the reason I think it is that you can't just be conscious: you have to be conscious of something.

No, unless the software included a representation of the computer itself. Then it might be capable of consciousness, IDK. But being so capable it would then be a person rather than just an app.

[pharke]

I think the confusion here is due to the fact that there are two arguable parts to the definition of consciousness.

1) awareness of objects, events and other stimuli and the ability to respond to those inputs with some output. This is the world acting upon a conscious agent and the agent acting upon the world.

2) awareness of oneself and one's inner experience and self reflection and the ability to cause changes in oneself. This is the conscious agent acting on itself.

1 is generally agreed upon as the required part of the definition. 2 is subject to some argument. If you accept 1 alone then you leave open the question of the zombie problem usually given as every conscious agent except for yourself is just acting as if they have an inner life but really are just responding to outside stimulus by some unknown mechanism. This is really just behaviorism and I argue that it would also apply to an individual in that their inner experience may very well just be an illusion. This seems absurd (and I think it is) and that is why 2 is brought on as a further distinguishing factor, perhaps the distinguishing factor since you can now imagine a consciousness existing with only reference to itself. This seems to be where your argument kicks in since you would need some state in order to build such an inner world but I think the point of the article is that you could suppose that there is some aspect of consciousness that underpins the whole thing. We've removed the requirement of outside stimulus, so now remove the inner stimulus of memory. What remains? Is there some other source of a priori stimulus? A generative factor from which perturbations in consciousness arise? Is there nothing but consciousness of being conscious? Absent that, is there simply a feeling of existence? This is the root at which we strike.

[grabbalacious]

Thanks. It's possible to unconsciously interact with objects. My guess is that conscious perception requires both representations of oneself and the object, together with associated memories. e.g. a green ball has an associations with 'grass' and 'apple' among many other things.

We can imagine and create new things but their attributes are always recombinations of the attributes of old things we already know about.

>you would need some state in order to build such an inner world

This feels a bit like essentialism to me. As far as I'm concerned I just am that inner world. It is built from my memories and experiences.

It is true that the inner world is in a particular state at any given time. But it's not made out of some kind of 'state-iness' stuff, any more than a brick is built out of 'brickiness'. Please correct me here if I'm wrong.

>is there simply a feeling of existence?

I don't think there's a feeling of existence per se. However one does with experience become aware of subtle sensations from the body at rest, for example noise in the optical system (static or 'snow'). One can then dream or imagine or think about these things too.