[Fis] the mother of information"--MINI-BRAINS

[Alexander Fingelkurts]

Dear All,

 

Regarding the discussion on consciousness, it seems that there is mixing of
intelligence functions with subjective experience. Modern smart phones and
computers have many of those intelligence functions, but they are lacking
consciousness. Moreover, in vast number of empirical studies it has been
repeatedly shown that consciousness could in principle exist without every
one of those functions (even though in normal healthy persons they usually
coexist). So consciousness is different from intelligence, as well as from
memory, from attention, and so on.

 

Another issue that is present in the debate about consciousness is that
usually constitutive and etiological explanations are mixed. At the same
time, they belong to different dimensions, and only one of them is
interesting in the context of the present discussion (how to verify the
presence of consciousness in the system or organoid brains). Constitutive
explanation ''looks'' downward and describes what constitutes the
phenomenon, while etiological explanation ''looks'' backward and specifies
the causal pathway that either brought about or modulated the phenomenon. We
argue In the case of consciousness, the constitutive basis includes such
immediately lower-level entities on which consciousness as a

whole is ontologically dependent (see Fig. 1 in the paper:
https://www.bm-science.com/images/bms/publ/art76.pdf), meaning that
consciousness could not exist without them to be present. In other words, a
constitutive explanation describes immediate lower-level processes that as a
whole is consciousness. On the contrary, an etiological explanation
considers the causal history or pathway chain of events that lead to
consciousness and it is neutral about the constitutive entities (Fig. 1),
because causal dependence does not entail ontological dependence. Thus, as
it is clearly stated by Revonsuo [Revonsuo A. Inner presence: consciousness
as a biological phenomenon. Cambridge: MIT Press; 2006], ''consciousness can
in principle exist even in the absence of the entities and activities that
make up its etiological pathway, while it cannot, even in principle, exist
without the entities and activities that make up its constitutive basis.''


 

Greetings,

Andrew & Alexander

 

 

 

___________________________________________ 
Dr. Alexander Fingelkurts, Ph.D.
Co-Head of Research 



BM-Science - Brain & Mind Technologies Research Centre
PL 77
FI-02601 Espoo, FINLAND
 
Tel. +358 9 541 4506 
 <mailto:alexander.fingelkurts at bm-science.com>
alexander.fingelkurts at bm-science.com
 



 

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