Psychological Solutions

This site has three purposes! First,this site will help you work through our program to beat an addiction of any kind. The program can be found in our book, "Beat Your Addiction". Second, we will share our ideas on issues other than addiction. Third, we will answer questions you may have about psychological issues, and offer psychotherapy privately to those who desire it from us.

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We are both Clinical Psychologists, each with over 35 years of experience.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Consciousness continued

Since I haven't commented on the consciousness post in over a year I'll continue my thoughts here. Carrying the idea that changing levels of awareness (sensitivity) signal consciousness to us suppose we rig our computer to not respond to anything but the dangerous extremes of stimulation when it is carrying out an unrelated procedure of sufficient complexity. Suppose further that by pushing the right buttons we can call it's attention to the problem. Then "Oh, thanks for warning me to moniter my sensors. I wasn't paying attention because I was preoccupied with solving some equations. It is getting too hot! I'd better retract my arm before I get hurt." In this case the sensors could have been continuing to register properly but , until alerted, the computer was not conscious of that. Those regesterings were the equivalent of unconscious processing in human minds. Can the computer be considered conscious yet? If not, what's missing? Whatever criteria you're using to recognize consciousness , does a six month old normal human baby pass those criteria? Are such infants conscious, sentient beings? Actually, I'm not convinced that a computer can have subjective experiences but I would find it hard to prove that the computer we have constructed in this exercise is not conscious . So, enough for now. Comments, of course are welcome.

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