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It also has a downside where the very consciousness has negative effects: for
example it neutralizes the survival instinct so people do reckless actions,suicide
(and not only people,whales too, apparently). But procentually speaking,a low
procent of people act in this way while a big procent of humans experience
individual evolution (and therefore evolution as species ) by having
consciousness .
And to lower this risk, we have an incomplete projection of our primar
conscience- meaning that we live, we learn to survive,we improve, but we dont
really know why we live or why we dont want to die-why we have a survival
instinct (other than species perpetuation). So the limitations works like a safety
barrier. If you look at a human in death danger his main,dominant if not only
concern is to survive. Why exactly? He dosent know,its a powerfull,strong
reaction that overhelms him.
Then,consciousness also gives us reason to live and evolve-family ,money etc.
So, in the same way the pain receptors prevent us from hurting ourselfs and help
us survive , consciousness is a tool used to help us survive and evolve. (I would
say the principal function is to help us evolve).
I remember that in one of your interviews you discussed the problem of abortion .
You said we do not know yet if a fetus is conscious or not.
I think that ,at some level,it is. Only not in our way . We associate consciousness
with other brain process - with emotions and also with pain sensation .
Repeating myself, pain its just a way of awareness about the body being
harmed. Our organism its designed to survive, so it designes the senzitive
neurons to detect and create a pain senzation that afects our consciousness TO
HELP US SURVIVE.
So before the brain is developed,technically, the fetus dosent feel pain.
Its like we have a machine,a computer. Not only does it have a hardware, it also
does has a software . And the software (considering the computer its
autonomous) , its aware about the hardware damages . Being aware about the
damages it can prevent and repair them using rationalization and logic that also
are part of its software (consciousness).
However a single cell,or a bacteria, cannot be compared with only the hardware
part of a machine,because ,as I said, even the virus that is ,by some, not
considerated a living organism, evolves!Changes! Redesignes itself! Without a
brain. So it has like a rudimentary software (you can metaphorically say it has
windows 95 and we have windows 8 as a comparision).
I will call the consciousness , as we tradionally define it with the ability to be
selfaware of our existence the second consciousness.
So the second consciousness becomes a product designed to help us evolve and
survive and we want to imprime that on a robot,a computer a neural spike to be
more precise.
I think that the reasons we fail yet to do this is because our brain is indeed the
center of our second consciousness, but the second consciousness derives from
the primary one that primary consciousness that makes the bacteria survive and
evolve.
And ,that primary consciousness is not located in the brain.
And the reason we have the second consciousness is because we need to deal
with the variations of the environment not only by our run or fight instinct but by
analyzing new situations and finding new outcomes. Robots,for example, like
inferior animals, are preprogrammed to react in some specific ways and that is
why they cannot perform complex actions (driving ,cooking) because they cannot
respond to a new situations (accidents,fire etc), while we ,evolved animals can.
(monkeys can use tools, elephants help other animals and have a complex social
structure etc).
So my theory is that all of our emotions and complex abilities derive from the
second consciousness.
And the second consciousness derives from the primar one, that we should
imprime to a machine.
I dont know how yet, not even what exactly is ,but, the simplest explication is
that the primar consciousness is the reason we have the survival instinct so
highly developed.
So , to create a conscious machine ,we should make a robot designed to survive
as a primal condition of his existence and we should make it capable of learning
things (using neural spiking) and choose (because that is the volitive behaviour
by its definition that,by my knowledges, most of the robts if not all of them
lack ) between information and also memorize information and delete information
by distinguishing which kind of information its usefull and which is not.
We can ,afterwards ,make it learn skills using conditional learning punishment
and reward.
So we should find something equivalent of the endorphine and pain sensation
and alternatively use them.
*Also,a chemical mediator works both analogue and digital in my opinion because
it encodes intensity ( a neuron synthesizes chemical mediator proportionally with
the impulse frequency ) and digitally because it encodes a specific reactions.
So,it works as a binary system . Before stimulation the neuron it is inactive and
after stimulation,the mottor neuron triggers different responses depending on
mediator.