Topic: Mind
For all you bots out there, I've been meaning to finish Dennett's consciousness explanation but no time. Where I left it, there was the issue of getting from something like, the best case scenario of blindsight proto-consciousness to normal color vision consciousness. His answer is basically to either increase sample rates or to lower expectations. He talks about a totally gay looking device built in the 70's that blind people can put on their eyes which then translates the visual input to taps on the stomach. Supposidly the subjects who used it got very good at navigating around. But surely, they didn't "see" anything like we see things. To drive the point home, he noted that when viewing a Playboy, it didn't do much for them. I think what Dennett meant to say here, is that the 20th generation device of that kind might give an experience similar to normal vision. That sounds kind of crazy, but imagine bats echolocating. If we could echolocate with the precision of the bat, what would that be like? Is it possible the experience would be something akin to "seeing"?
The other possibility is lowering expectations. Could someone get used to that level of experience and eventually be "turned on" by a lower sample rate? Well, anyone who's been 13 (or 23!) and discovered that on older tv's, tuning in between channels when connected to basic cable can result in a very snowy cinamax adult movie experience, which nevertheless can be quite exciting. Expectations are probably built up in other ways independent of "raw input." Someone blind from birth with now fully restored vision and brought up let's say in an culturally isolated environment and presented with an adult magazine after a sight restoration surgery might not experience what we expect.
Finally, I want to mention he brings up a very important point about the continuity of experience - this of course factors in to the above when talking about the right bit rate in order to achieve a full, conscious life. To put it in my own words, if your eye was shaped like a keyhole, you'd be oblivious to any keyhole-like experience. There is no reason to believe we'd experience anything but a flowing, continuous-like representation of the world no matter how disjointed the input is objectively. And he gives a number of experiences to show just how clumsy human vision really is. But absent something to compare it too, there is no reason to think experience would be anything but continuous. And a higher bit-rate isn't necessarily the key to a more intense experience. If we could be operated on an achieve such intense vision that we could see on a microscopic level from a few feet away, gawking at a supermodel would completely loose its appeal. In fact, cultural norms of beauty rest somewhere below our maximum bit-rate abilities to perceive. We like flesh represented with some airbrush and music with reverb.
Of course, I still haven't found the direct answer to my minimal consciousness quesiton. He's imaginary interlocutor, Otto, brings up good points, but always misses calling him on "seeming".
