A view to Consciousness

by Casian STEFAN, Principal Researcher at Essentia Mundi AI Lab. Contact: ai-AT-essentiamundi.com / ai.essentiamundi.com
Ian. 2024.

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We are not thinking.
We are not acting in virtue of free will.
We are not storing memories.
We bend to environment.

In the quest to address the so called consciousness, a complicated byproduct that puzzles the philosophers and alike minded, I practice (as anyone I suppose) a thinking prior, without thinking much of the frame of reference: we take for granted that the mind knows that "it" is thinking. That it is able to think about itself. In turn that we posses consciousness.

But with my practice here, I try to depart myself from that view in the sense of not going down the hole of consciousness explaining way. Why? Because one, once in that path, will not very successful find an answer. And again why? I think because basically (as with the language formalization efforts) it is a bottom up approach, but does not go to the bottom of things in respect to the reference frame. Also I think the other approach is even worse: the top-down decipher.

First, taking the perspective of the observer: it is always a limited view. Ultimately a human senses perspective. A different from a bat (or a dog) alright but always a reductio ad absurdum, by ignoramus maximus.
In order to escape this perspective, we need to learn about the perspective of the other's. Of the other "alive" entities, of what we consider conscious entities. In that respect we can ask: does a dog knows what it sees when it looks at the sky? Does it care? No, I would say. Not even having or needing (psychological, metaphysical, factual) to ask that. "If a lion could speak we would not understand him!" as Wittgenstein puts it. For the dog this is an unknown unknown at most.
In the same perspective, I would argue it is the same with humans. (And this limitation is also answering the question of alien life - or if we are alone - which we?)
Alright, we see the skies, we care, but that "care" is at the same level as the dog's care about his own world / environment (a dog's environment: is constructed around senses, finding his ways about in the environment, maintaining homeostatic shape, having some learning imbued in the brain, mostly spending an automated state.)
I always though what a dog thinks when it runs and stops abruptly? What causes that stopping from an action with a long (seconds) pause. There seems always an astonishing of calcuclus there on what to do next. But it is only apparently so.

From this perspective we are very very little more as the environment per se. Senses with the central unit (brain coordinating the multi-cellular body) is a small energy string that gets molded in an environment. It is a string like tensor that has only the ability to have curls, to stretch. It adapts, learns, remains bent, un-bents - in an environment flow.

And that is pretty all.

Everything else that comes as an explanation it is just a psychological need - as we enter the territory of the molded self already in the flow. That is the crux of the problem of consciousness in my view: that there is a psychological need that ultimately can't be satisfied further in an objective fashion (let alone a strong mathematical formalization.) It also is the case, as in the psychological explorations of the mind and the trying to decipher the thoughts as in the network of neural cells, there is mainly no causal nexus from the objective to the psychological. There is mainly a self made, formalized in our thoughts and language, a causal web of inference, that we suppose we can grasp in an outsider, superposition view.

Here further the case for the further analogy regarding life. I used the analogy of the water drop - the analogy I used 20 years back when using it to write about music and vibrations: why the drop has the shape it has? My answer then: it is the instance of the other forces (the broadest sense of the Environment.)

And a refined analogy: one that approaches the thinking exercise about consciousness virtue. I am thinking about the surface of the water. On the surface there is a thin ice surface. On this ice thin surface there are also some leaves (eg. alien elements to the environment) which are caught on this thin surface, but they are not yet ice encased.
Take the action that happens in the water part, that it is maintaining the leaves. But at the same time the leaves are caught and there is little space to move. While the surface is frozen, the leaves are moving in their little space around them. From the surface observing or from the perspective of other leaves, they appear as flickering, as having movement, as having a life.

And that is all about it.



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Exploration by C. Stefan, 01.Ian.2024 [about]
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