Computation, reduction, and teleology of consciousness
Section snippets
Mechanistic views of consciousness
Can we explain consciousness in mechanistic terms? In science, we generally assume the sufficiency and necessity of mechanistic explanations (if we are not going to be dualists). By mechanistic explanation, it is meant any concrete physical processes, that is computational processes in the broadest sense of the term ‘computational’. In general, ‘computation’ is a broad term that can be used to denote any process that can be realized computationally, ranging from chaotic dynamics (Freeman, 1995)
Teleological views of consciousness
In terms of mechanistic explanations of consciousness (e.g., in the form of a cognitive model), I have shown that the explanations in terms of knowledge content, knowledge organization, or knowledge processing are untenable. Thus, it leaves us with one possibility — knowledge representation; that is, the difference in representation accounts for the phenomenological distinction between the conscious and the unconscious. However, a further issue concerning the functional role of consciousness
Concluding remarks
In this paper, I focused on the issue of the physical (mechanistic or computational) basis of consciousness, proposing the framework of a mechanistic account of consciousness and, in turn, a teleological account of consciousness in this framework. Analyses and argumentation showed that the difference between localist (symbolic) representations and distributed representations (as employed in the connectionist theorizing and modeling) led to a plausible account of consciousness and its functional
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