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From: dinitz@uicsl.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Parallelism and Conciousness - (nf)
Message-ID: <3572@uiucdcs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 31-Oct-83 22:55:44 EST
Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.3572
Posted: Mon Oct 31 22:55:44 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 3-Nov-83 22:55:18 EST
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#R:sri-arpa:-1299800:uicsl:15500012:000:1598
uicsl!dinitz    Oct 31 08:57:00 1983

I see no reason why consciousness should be inherently parallel.  But
it turns out that the only examples of conscious entities (i.e. those
which nearly everyone agrees are conscious) rely heavily on parallelism
at several levels.  This is NOT to say that they derive their
consciousness from parallelism, only that there is a high corelation
between the two.

There are good reasons why natural selection would favor parallelism.
Besides the usually cited ones (e.g. speed, simplicity) is the fact
that the world goes by very quickly, and carries a high information
content.  That makes it desirable and advantageous for a conscious
entity to be aware of several things at once.  This strongly suggests
parallelism (although a truly original species might get away with
timesharing).

Pushing in the other direction, I should note that it is not necessary
to bring the full power of the human intellect to bear against ALL of
our environment at once.  Hence the phenomenon of attention.  It
suffices to have weaker processes in charge of uninteresting phenomena
in the environment, as long as these have the ability to enlist more of
the organism's information processing power when the situation becomes
interesting enough to demand it.  (This too could be finessed with a
clever timesharing scheme, but I know of no animal that does it that
way.)

Once again, none of this entails a connection causal connection between
parallelism and consciousness.  It just seems to have worked out that
nature liked it that way (in the possible world in which we live).

Rick Dinitz
...!uiucdcs!uicsl!dinitz