Endodermal, mesodermal, and exodermal tissues -- all of it. If its alive its performing SRIPs.
Please give me an example - a specific example - noting that
all of your previous examples have been wrong.
Hence my objection to your usage of the term. What you're calling "consciousness" isn't whats being discussed when most other English speakers use the word.
In fact, it is precisely what's being discussed; rather, it's that most people (like you) don't know what's happening and how it happens.
The logical conclusion of your tautology is that individuals are never unconscious.
Well, duh. If they're unconscious by that definition, they're not individuals, they're corpses.
And an organism is made up of up to trillions of such modules. All of them processing information within and between each other, collectively regulating and modifying their behavior and development.
Yes.
The entire system is inherently self-referential.
No. You still completely fail to understand what self-reference is. Read Hofstadter. He takes 600 pages to explain it, from many different angles. I've already explained it here repeatedly; if you haven't grasped it by now, you're not going to understand it from a forum post.
Read
Godel, Escher, Bach, and then come back. It covers not only self-reference but other key concepts like the Church-Turing thesis and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
I've grasped the concept from the get go.
You clearly haven't, because the examples you propose do
not constitute examples of self-referential information processing. Not one of them.
Its not at all difficult to understand.
Then why do you keep getting it wrong? In every example, you mistake simple reference for self-reference.
The problem is that you're refusing to see that what you're calling consciousness is not the phenomenon being discussed.
You keep getting that wrong, too, of course.
That definition you so clumsily avoided? The very first definition?
1. the state of being conscious; awareness of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.
Awareness of one's thoughts, eh? Thinking is information processing. Thinking about your thoughts is self-referential information processing.
If thats true then you must be of a radically different make up than other humans, PixyMisa.
Nope. I just acknowledge what's going on.
No coherent response, then?
Please tell me that you're just trolling...
Nope. It's simply true. A large part of the reason to run simulations is to work out how the process being simulated actually works. You need to know at some level how the components behave, and how they are organised. You program that in and press enter.
Assuming your special definition of the word "consciousness", sure.
You still haven't explained how my definition is supposed to be different from any other definition
that actually matches what happens. I acknowledge that it is different from fairy-tale definitions that people like Chalmers and Jackson like to present.
I dunno, Pixy. Maybe I'm just shtoopid
I don't think you are. Read
Godel, Escher, Bach. Really.
An individual cell's systems of genetic expression and epigenetic regulation alone meet the operational criteria of a SRIP.
There's reference there. There's computation, yes.
That is not enough.
This isn't even taking into account other systems within the cell linked to these regulatory processes, or the higher level systems of regulation they're tied to in multicellular critters.
Multiple levels of regulation does not constitute self-reference.
As is already blatantly obvious to anyone who isn't brain dead, you and I don't mean the same thing when we say "conscious".
Yes we do. You apparently haven't examined the implications.
The word in the English language already has multiple meanings. That's why psychologists tend to use different and more specific terms like
arousal and
attention. I'm just pointing this out and providing a more specific (but entirely corresponding) definition for one of those meanings.
Did it ever cross your mind that perhaps it is you whos failing to grasp something crucial?
Oh, sure, many times.
Never in talking to you, though.
Being directly aware of any stimuli external to ourselves.
That's supposed to be a
counter-example?
First, it's important to note that you are not "directly aware" of any external stimuli. Ever. That's simply not how things work. Everything is mapped through multiple levels of abstraction.
Now, if you're talking about simply responding to the stimulus - blink at a sudden bright light - that needn't involve consciousness at all. (At least, not the consciousness that is you; it may well be that the prestriate cortex forms an autonomous consciousness in its processing of visual perception, for example. Of course, you would have no way to tell directly, but we could work this out
by simulating it.)
So what level are you talking about?
Stimulus? Association? Attention?
Judging from some of your above statements, I'm not even certain you're operating in the same universe as the rest of us, Pixy...
Yes, we know you have that problem. Try to get over it.
