harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad) (01/22/87)
Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA> wrote in mod.ai: > A quibble: It would be possible to remember having a toothache > without actually having one. It is also possible, as Minsky seems > to suggest, that my entire conscious perception of a current toothache > is an "illusory pain" based on the memory of a neural signal > of a moment ago. These views do not solve the problem, of course; > the C-2 consciousness must be explained even if the C-1 experience > was an illusion. My conscious memory of the event is more than > just an uninterpreted memory of a memory of a memory ... There is still no C-2 without C-1. For accompanying every C-2 episode is a C-1 as substrate. Not only is there something it's like to have a toothache (C-1), but there's also something it's like to REMEMBER having a toothache (likewise C-1). The experience of remembering is a qualitative experience too. The toothache may never actually have happened. You may not even have a tooth. But the qualitative sense of remembering it has the "phenomenological validity" that I claimed all 1st order conscious experience does. For if the C-2 episode is not a qualitative experience, what qualifies it as conscious at all? My point is subtle, but valid. I advise the perplexed to reread the definitions of C-1 and C-2. Ken Laws's example of an "illusory" C-1 trades on the ambiguity between (a) the causal and temporal reality (i.e, when, whether and why the tooth injury and neural events actually happened in real time) of the CONTENTS of a conscious experience and (b) their phenomenological validity (i.e., what you experienced them AS). The memory of my toothache may be illusory in relation to the toothache I never in reality had, but it is no illusion that I am having such a memory now -- and that experience is the ineluctible C-1 substrate on which any C-2 or higher must piggy-back. (And there's no point doing another deferred-temporal number on THAT experience, analogous to the one on the toothache -- misremembering remembering, or some such -- because it only leads to infinite regress, and still logically requires an ongoing C-1 to justify calling it conscious.) No C-2 without an underlying C-1 too. -- Stevan Harnad (609) - 921 7771 {allegra, bellcore, seismo, rutgers, packard} !princeton!mind!harnad harnad%mind@princeton.csnet