Template:M intro design time: Difference between revisions

What sets the conscious apart is the sense of “I”: myself as a unitary, bounded entity — even if those boundaries are a bit fuzzy<ref>per {{author|Daniel Dennett}}, “If you make yourself really small, you can externalise virtually everything,” and vice versa</ref> — that existed yesterday, exists now and will, the Gods willing, still exist tomorrow, that exists amongst a set of things that are ''not'' I, but that otherwise share that same characteristic of longitudinal continuity. There are “things” in the universe beyond “my” boundaries with which “I” must interact and that, consequently the problems and opportunities that “I” face in that universe , and with those things, have the same causal continuity. “I” have discretion, or a sort of agency, to do something about them based upon “my” best interests as “I” perceive them.  

It is only if all these continuities are necessary and important to that there is any need to hypothesise a conscious “I”. There is a chicken and egg thing here: a [[strange loop]]: ''important to whom?''

We suppose that a sense of “I” is not important to plants, for example.<ref>We may be wrong. Who knows?</ref> They can get by automatically, by algorithmic operation of evolved functions in their cells. Their cells operate rather like miniature Turing machines. If this then, that. What great advantage would consciousness yield? It does not matter what happened yesterday, or what will happen tomorrow, except as far as previous events influenced how things are now, and even then everything a cell needs to know about what happened yesterday is encoded in the state of its environment now. The relevant past is encoded, laterally, on the present. Evolving a consciousness, a sense of “self”, would require great effort, consume huge resources, and confer little benefit. It might actually ''decrease'' adaptive fitness: a plant which evolved over millennia to automatically optimise its immediately available resources, but which can now think about whether to do so, is unlikely to make better decisions than [[Darwin’s Dangerous Idea]]. For plants , consciousness does not pass the evolutionary test: the [[business case]] fails.

Modern materialists will raise a finger at the dreaded [[dualism]]: this is a [[Cartesian]] view, mystical, godly. “''Je pense, donc je suis''” has been out of fashion for a century but didn’t {{author|Daniel Dennett}} hammer in the last nail with {{br|Consciousness Explained}}? Well, no — for consciousness in that narrow sense of self—awareness; a comprehension of one’s person as a unitary object in time and space, and therefore, per Descartes, a profoundly different thing than ''every other thing in the universe'' — is precisely the thing to be explained. It is a clever sleight of hand to define it away before kick-off — full marks for the brio, professor Dennett — but it won’t really do. We are left with the same conundrum we started with.

Traditional computer code is not like that. It has no tense. It does not understand past, present or future: for the applications to which it is put it does not ''need'' to. It performs millions of discrete “operations” — arithmetic calculations — that come at it as if from a firehose. It has no need to ask ''why'' it performs these operations, nor how they relate to each other. Hence, GIGO: if its instructions are flawed, a Turing machine cannot diagnose the problem much less speculate as to the programmer’s likely intent and take that course of action. It just crashes.<ref>Better programs can query ostensible input errors, but only if they have been ''programmed'' to. [[Large learning model]]s can guess, but only by association with familiar patterns: they do not “form an independent theory of the world” much less develop theories about the inentional states of their creators.</ref>

For a thing’s temporality of things is not apparent on an infinitesimal snapshot represented by any presentation of data. Things which are immutable and things which are liable to change look the same. We assign rights based upon the nature of things, and it matters how permanent those things happen to be. A human’s count of arms and legs us the same — barring catastrophe, and it can hardly ''grow'' — but ones tastes and opinions, however devoutly held, can change. In a fully functioning adult, indeed, they ''should''.

(The seventy year old man who cleaves to the same politics he did when he was fifteen ''hasn’t learned anything''.)

===The past is not like the future===

In another way is continuity important. Unless you accept some kind of hard deterministic model of utter predestination — in which case, I commiserate you for having to read this foppish screed, but you have no choice — then the past and the future are entirely unalike in an important way. This is obvious but bear with me.

There is only one past, and infinite futures.

It follows that things in the past are fixed. They cannot change. We may remember them, learn from them, and in the future compensate for them, but we cannot change them.  We can only change the stories we tell about them. We do this a lot This is the function of history. But what is done is done.

All risk and all opportunity therefore lies in the future. The past is fully priced. That is why you can’t place a bet on yesterday’s Grand National. (Well you could, but after the bookies’ spread, the odds would be poor).

Similarly, all victories, all defeats, all vindications and grievances are in the past. We can tell ourselves different stories about them, we can change our minds about how good or bad we think they were, but they are done. They are realised. The profit or loss is known and booked. The potential profit and loss for the future is not. It is — unless you are a deterministic predestination fan, in which case, put your feet up — to some extent within our gift. Among the infinite branches of our possible futures, there are infinite losses and infinite gains. Which ones we capture is, partly, up to us. The ones we have already booked are not.

Focusing on remediating the past at the expense of the future is a rum business. This is why so many legal rights go unexercised. The client imperative. The revenue to be earned in the unknowable future colossally outweighs the realised loss on ''this'' trade. Learn your lesson, take the loss, show yourself to be a good sport, and concentrate on the next win. Trade your magnanimity for extra business. Or sue, and end the revenue