(MACHINE) CONSCIOUSNESS – EVERYDAY KNOWLEDGE – RETURN TO START

On my philosophy-science blog I have published a new post in German. Here a shortened version in English.

SYSTEMS ENGINEERING AND CONSCIOUSNESS

 In that post I mentioned a new book project (together with others) where we reformulate systems engineering as a science and within this framework we are dealing with the way systems engineers translate problems into working products. What is new in our approach is the explicit handling of the topic of knowledge processing within the actors. The actor concept includes humans as well as intelligent machines. This gives rise to many interesting questions like what really is intelligence, what really is consciousness in the case of humans as well as machines.

NO THEORY UNTIL NOW

While there exists meanwhile a growing group of 'machine believers' which assume the replacement of humans by intelligent machines in the future, we have still no clear knowledge, who humans as homo sapiens really are? What is intelligence in the full sense? With regard to the concept of 'consciousness' we have until today no (!) scientific concept, what it is. This is a really weak point of the hundreds of articles talking about 'neuronal correlates of consciousness'.

MACHINE CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH WITH INSIGHTS

Especially the growing research to machine consciousness gives new insights into the methodological problems of the concept of 'consciousness'. An excellent review about this research and the known problems can be found in the paper „The rise of machine consciousness: Studying consciousness with computational models“ by James A.Reggia (2013) ('Neural Networks', https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8333/603ff38df5fb8277f0ef945b3d4c6ccd672e.pdf ). In a later paper from 2017 one can find a even more critical account of the methodological problems of this research: „Exploring the Computational Explanatory Gap' by Reggia et.al in 'Philosophies' ( doi:10.3390/philosophies2010005 ).

WHICH WAY TO GO?

Stating the methodological limits of an approach is one thing, offer a new and better approach is something else. I am pointing to the history of philosophy and psychology dealing with these questions and mentioning there especially the phenomenological approach to the question of consciousness. But despite some interesting ideas we don't have until today a real theory nor a really practicable method which could be used by engineers to solve real world problems. An engineer needs methods to be able to talk about real behavior, about the interactions between a real context and the inner states of an actor, and some possibility how to predict future behavior as far this is possible for behavior which includes some degrees of freedom.

BACK TO THE ROOTS

Lacking usable theories from the sciences until now I decided to go back to the roots of everything, to the behavior of humans in their everyday live. Here everybody is acting whether he/she has some knowledge or not. Children learn to move and to talk without any explicit theory in their heads. They learn it because their bodies provide structures and dynamics which allow such (learning) behavior without an explicit teaching!

DO WE KNOW THE FULL POTENTIAL?

What we are doing in science is only this: trying to explain what is there by observing the dynamics, here the behavior. Doing this in the right way then there is only one problem left: what do we describe when the observed system – here a human person – does not exploit his full potential? Which kind of a human person do we describe when this human person dos not live his full potential because some cultural patterns do forbid him/her certain behaviors or when the environment of these persons is to poor to enable a more interesting and sophisticated behavior? Then, clearly, our pictures of such persons would be wrong. We as researchers would describe a certain variant of what it could mean to be a human person, but we would not describe the human person in his full potential. Our present societies as well as the history teaches us, that the way how people are allowed or enabled to live in this world are very often and very widely very poor and repressive. Therefore one has to hypothesize that the picture what a homo sapiens really could be if he would have an optimal support is only in its beginning. We are not yet in our full potential.

I DECIDED TO START

Knowing these problems and possibilities I decided to start my research about the human consciousness in the middle of everyday life where we are acting before we have too much theories. And I start this research without brain-sciences and psychology in the beginning because these disciplines are dealing by definition not with consciousness. If some day some fragment of a theory of consciousness is available one can consider a super theory relating the theory of behavior (psychology), the theory of brain activities (brain-sciences), and a theory of consciousness (philosophy) one to another. This can become an interesting job. Nobody did this until now, and we are writing the year 2017.

This will be continuued...