Is consciousness more like chess or the weather?
So he says that he doesn’t think consciousness is computational, but in the rest of the article pretty much everything he says about it is in terms of processing information.<p>“ In fact, the brain is always making predictions about what’s out there in the world or in the body. And using sensory signals to update those predictions. What we consciously experience is not a readout of the sensory data in a kind of outside-in direction. It’s the predictions themselves. It’s the brain’s best guess of what’s going on.”<p>So, processing information, then.<p>“ I argue that this entails that the brain is or has a predictive model of its own body, because prediction is very good for regulation.”<p>Sounds like information processing to me.<p>“ A conscious experience, typically for us humans, brings together a large amount of information about the world, from many different modalities at once—sight, sound, touch, taste, smell—in a single unified scene that immediately makes apparent what the organism should do next. That’s the primary function of consciousness—to guide the motivated behavior of the organism that maximizes its chances of staying alive.”<p>Do I have to say it again? Every single function he ascribes to consciousness consists or receiving and processing information, and making decisions.<p>We know the answer to this. Any Turing complete system is capable in principle of any information processing task. Whatever else brains are, we know they are information processing systems. Perceptions go in, and decisions come out. All of our conscious experience is of information. Feelings, sensations, emotions, decisions, they’re all information. What else is there?<p>Edit: On the weather. When I imagine a rain storm, nothing actually gets wet. So is that activity of imagination more like the weather, or more like a computer simulation of the weather?