There is a recent article, Is Consciousness More Like Chess or the Weather?, where a professor said,
Consciousness and intelligence are very different things. There’s this assumption in and around the AI community that, as AI gets smarter, at some point, maybe the point of general AI—the point at which AI becomes as intelligent as a human being—suddenly the lights come on for the system, and it’s aware. It doesn’t just do things, it feels things. But intelligence, broadly defined, is about doing the right thing at the right time, having and achieving goals in a flexible way. Consciousness is all about subjective, raw experience, feelings—things like pain, pleasure, and experiences of the world around us and of the self within it. There may be some forms of intelligence that require consciousness in humans and other animals. But fundamentally they’re different things. This assumption that consciousness just comes along for the ride is mistaken.
There’s lots of stuff that goes on in the brain that doesn’t seem to be directly implicated in consciousness. Everything’s indirectly implicated. But if we look at where the tightest relationships are between brain activity and consciousness, we can rule out large parts of the brain. We can rule out the cerebellum. The cerebellum, at the back of the brain, has three quarters of all our neurons yet doesn’t seem to be directly implicated in consciousness at all. So if you just had a cerebellum by itself, my guess is it would not support any conscious experiences. The right way to think about that, is that just being made of neurons, and having this kind of biological substrate—well, that might be necessary for consciousness, but it’s certainly not sufficient.
If consciousness is about subjective, raw experience and feelings, what do these have in common? They cannot all be factored in for consciousness, if there is nothing central, they must have to qualify.
If neurons are in the thalamus, the cerebral cortex and in the cerebellum, but those in the cerebellum play a lesser role, what is it about those in the thalamus and the cerebral cortex that makes them directly drive consciousness?
The brain can be said to not be directly involved in consciousness. Consciousness is from the mind. The mind and the brain are neighbors, but they are not the same. The cells and molecules of the brain shape, construct, organize or build the components of the mind. It is the interaction of the components of mind that derives consciousness.
All the mind does is to know. What is labeled as regulation or control of internal senses are done, within knowing, given by the mind. It is the mind that holds knowing information, observed as emotions, feelings, modulation, memory and reactions.
It is what is known that is used to determine responses, internally or externally. There are features of the components of mind and their mechanisms, but the mind or the brain does not make predictions. There is also no internal model of the world that was not first picked up—close to accurate by the mind.
There are destinations in the mind with properties that decide what becomes an emotion, feeling and so on. Conceptually, quantities acquire properties across mind locations. It is what is acquired that becomes known, experienced, regulated or controlled, happening in prioritization or pre-prioritization.
In parts of the brain where consciousness is mostly implicated, it can be said that properties that neurons there are enabled to give, for the mind, are more than in other places like the cerebellum.
Consciousness or sentience is centralized by knowing. It is how much can be known, across divisions that determine how conscious or sentient any specie is. Intelligence is a rate of knowing, including of what is known and how it is used. A percentage of it could present part sentience.
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: iStock