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Nicolas Nelson Sec1A, Week 7

So consciousness, huh? A good deal of art is intended to enlighten the audience to their lack thereof on a particular topic that they might be inspired to rise up from ignorance. http://edrewmsu.googlepages.com/socialjustice.jpg/socialjustice-full;init:.jpg Pretty much all of science does that. Technology is the interesting point of the triangle this time; it’s not indicative of unawareness—it’s limited by it.

The same way our five frail, imprecise senses of the universe are limited to the electromagnetic radiation, dissociated ions, and forms of pressure parts of our bodies touch, technology is the body limited to human knowledge. It’s sort of the inverse to the mind because what is tangible has a greater influence on the mechanisms of a robot, as opposed to emotions which usually impact a human brain to a vastly greater degree than physical injury. http://www.savingadvice.com/images/blog/depression.jpg This is innate and derived from generations of evolution and behavior and physical chemical reactions, whereas programmed responses in machines are the byproduct of ingenuity and cleverness.

This goes back to the concept of robots and consciousness. Can they ever “think” or will they just “process,” no matter how advanced they get? Could computers compose poetry? Do animals make “art” or are they simply trained to perform tricks? http://babble.com/CS/blogs/strollerderby/2008/07/08-15/elephant-painting-2-741828.jpg Honestly, I don’t think any one person has a right to say what is cognizant and what is not, but for the moment I think it’s safe to say that robots at their present state are but machines, computers thus far cannot feel and so cannot write literature with any sort of real value to humanity (unless we force the worth into it by interpreting it through our own feelings), and modern man remains the only species with the capacity to desire to create art independently.

But that said, the elusive asymptote between “conscious” and “not conscious” remains to be defined. Just because we haven’t broached the limit yet doesn’t mean our technology never will, nor evolution’s animalian psyches. The presentations in class used several different definitions to approach the concept, but none of them could contour the same dotted line for all cases. Though it gives people a place to start, there can be no strict formula to scientifically evaluate consciousness. There are always exceptions and fluctuations, and any attempt to discretely, scientifically define awareness is an endeavor to find a rule to that one rule of them all without exception. It takes art, imagination, and intuition to say that a dog and a cat have personas and sentience, the same way science can try to assess a dolphin or chimpanzee’s intelligence quotient. But humans are the only ones who care that they care. Perhaps we should care about that?

Art is inspired by awareness, and its limitations. Dreams from the subconscious are a huge role in metaphorical literature and literal representations. Our susceptibility to a narrow range of photon frequencies gives us an ideally balanced color wheel; in addition to brightness sensors, the retina has three different receptor types for the three respective primary colors. http://universe-review.ca/I10-85-retina.jpg Those few variables paint the vast, foggy sight we have of this diverse world. But without all our entwining, overlapping, intricate layers of further developed consciousness, why would such an aesthetic evolutionary achievement be anything more than a mere adaptation for hunting prey and evading predators? And reproducing. http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/webpictures/pairofbirds.jpg We all know, or at least know of, the beauty in that. Dolphins do too, I suppose, so one might wonder if they’re not right behind (or ahead of) us? Ah, but we have thumbs. Yes, that makes sense: we must be more aware than they are because we have thumbs.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 10:42 pm and is filed under week_7. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.