Dan Goodman on Nostr: #Consciousness question from someone who read #philosophy stuff on this years ago but ...
#Consciousness question from someone who read #philosophy stuff on this years ago but nothing from #neuroscience. Is it generally understood to be a memory phenomenon? It seems logically that it must be (see below), but that's not the way the philosophy stuff I have read about it discussed it.
My argument is that the only thing we could be talking about if we're talking consciousness is things that have made their way into a specific memory subsystem (the ones that are accessible to our language systems), otherwise we wouldn't be able to talk about it. Similarly, anything that has made its way into that memory subsystem would also be something we were conscious of. In other words, consciousness is just the set of things that go into that subsystem.
So is consciousness just the study of some particular memory subsystem and the way it interacts with other systems like language? And if we don't understand how memory works, can we understand anything about consciousness?
My argument is that the only thing we could be talking about if we're talking consciousness is things that have made their way into a specific memory subsystem (the ones that are accessible to our language systems), otherwise we wouldn't be able to talk about it. Similarly, anything that has made its way into that memory subsystem would also be something we were conscious of. In other words, consciousness is just the set of things that go into that subsystem.
So is consciousness just the study of some particular memory subsystem and the way it interacts with other systems like language? And if we don't understand how memory works, can we understand anything about consciousness?