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Where lies Consciousness?
Paul Thomas Zenki’s article, “Five Popular Lies You Hear About Consciousness” (https://medium.com/illumination-curated/five-lies-about-consciousness-49d54aa260dd), is an excellent one. I just want to add a few thoughts of my own, from a decades-long study of language and cognition including attempts to build computational models of cognition and language use.
Before we get to “consciousness”, I think we need to agree on some other terms, whose meanings we may find less mysterious.
Things that interact with each other may be said to “experience” those interactions. Even a stone, when struck, can be said to experience that strike in the sense that the interaction causes a change in it. The change in the stone may be only temporary, as by elevating its temperature slightly, or even just extrinsic, by changing its position relative to other things. Or the change in the stone may be more permanent, by changing its structure — perhaps wearing it down at the point of impact, or even causing it to fragment.
“Memory making” by a system can be defined as a process that records, in some kind of semi-permanent structure, information about an interaction or interactions, which the system itself can retrieve later to use in decisions affecting its own behavior. The…
