Welcome to My Ruminations on Consciousness

Welcome.

I am creating this blog as a locus for posts and discussions (I hope) about consciousness and how the mind works.

I am nobody ... a college dropout who has been a computer programmer doing business applications for the past 25 years. But I have a deep and agile mind, the programmer's infamous "puzzle solver" mindset, and a long history of reading about science as well as "doing" technology ... and I don't think consciousness is really a problem.

In regards to consciousness, I am puzzled by why so many people still regard it as a puzzle.

While my reading of philosophy and questions of mind had before been shallow, a few years ago I read Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained". It went click. It was lacking in much detail ... which I think can be filled in, but the overall picture seemed correct.

Since then I've read much more on the philosophy and science of mind, and with some elaboration on Dennett's model from years of argument, reading, and contemplating upon it, I think I can answer most of the outstanding questions that the philosophers prattle about regarding mind and consciousness and can rebut most criticisms of Dennett's model, or retort by my elaborations. To my satisfaction, anyway. I think all the mystery is gone. All that's left is work - a lot of it, which sadly I am in no position to undertake. But I can blog.

Which doesn't imply that I think we can build a human level conscious machine today. Maybe not tomorrow. But it won't be long. Of course my understanding is that a machine with consciousness is a trivial problem. Consciousness is not the problem - it is a very shallow phenomenon as it must be having arisen only lately in evolutionary time. The real problem of human level consciousness is the question of information synthesis, organization, representation, and retrieval interacting with our motivations as well as consciousness.

But solve the problem of representing information across multiple levels of scope, abstraction and multiple aspects and creating it from raw sensory information of the world, and then building human-like consciousness will be little problem. Of course consciousness does play a part in that, as I hope to elaborate in coming posts, but it is only a part of that problem. Understanding consciousness does not crack the AI problem; it is only part of it and a small part at that.

As said, I am nobody, and undoubtedly some of the results of my ruminations on consciousness will be wrong. But I hope that discussing my understanding may stimulate those who, now or in the future, may be in a position to do something about defining and hopefully settling the philosophical issues with scientific rigor.


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The name of this blog, "Machine in the Shell", is of course a take off to the beautiful classic anime "Ghost in the Shell". That name derives from Gilbert Ryle's (Dennett's mentor) scornful description of dualism, "ghost in the machine", which Arthur Koestler appropriated for his book. GitS posits a subtle form of substance dualism. that individual consciousness or "soul" is an ultra-complex non-reproducible wave form. The name of this blog, by contraries, is the assertion that consciousness is simply a portmanteau for a body of matter properly organized to carry out various information processing functions in relation to its environment. The unremarkably mundane conception of a machine and its shell is intended as a stark statement of how shallow I think consciousness is.

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ColonelZen is simply a handle for Terrence W. Zellers. Many years ago I was half watching a football game, half reading an article on the internet called something like "The Zen of Kernel Maintenance" and half doing web things (I'm good at math too!). For some reason yahoo would not let me create an account with my normal handle, tzellers, but there was an ad on the football game. For KFC. And ColonelZen was born. As partial justification, while I've never served in the military, I have indulged a bit of zen practice on occasion.


Hopefully, before long, I will start posting some meat on what I think is going on with consciousness, and perhaps others will join in and we can have fun arguing various ideas about phenomenalism, qualia, the Chinese room, mysterianism, zombies, property dualism and other arcana.

-- TWZ