psotka%white.DECnet@ARI-HQ1.ARPA.UUCP (03/09/87)
Consciousness and memory appear to be connected: but what is the connection? Davis in a posting on March 7, 1987 offers the opinion that consciousness allows us to be good psychologists; to understand other humans in ways that a Turing machine could not. It seems an interesting suggestion. If consicousness is tied into memory, it is to personalize the memory and make it distinguishable from external events; the environment; the reality that exists continuously outside and that we use so intensively to support our mental apparatus. The external world helps us to think in so many ways; cues for arithmetic in supermarkets; support for troubleshooting complex equipment (What would we do if we could not see the instruments?); questions raised implicitly by mystifying situations, etc. etc. How can we tell what is our own input (memory) from what comes naturally: we are "conscious" of the real world and this consciousness becomes part of the record of the world. So consciousness is functional; we could not separate our memories from outside reality without it. At least, that appeasrs to be an interesting clue to add to the puzzle. ------ -------