A frequent rhetorical question that comes up in science blog posts is: what is consciousness? This is usually framed within the context of an article about self-consciousness as some insurmountable wall for artificial intelligence research. The problem of course is not (simply) that consciousness is hard to achieve, it is that we lack a common definition.
Today a reasonably concise definition of consciousness popped into my head thanks to this article from Curiosity. This was my comment on the post:
It is easier to define consciousness if you take a step back from the individual. We are a communal species. Communication allowed us to work together. Speech and speech processing are reciprocal systems, allowing us to communicate internally - essentially making the self a community of one that acts as two (speaker/listener). Speaking to yourself and knowing that you are the source is the simplest self-awareness. Self-awareness + comparison + prediction + action = consciousness.
I really like solid feeling around the definition of self-awareness. (Self-awareness is another nebulous term that gets batted around by philosophers and scientists.)
The most exciting part about that definition was the idea that our multi functional brain processes and packages thoughts for consumption by others, and that perhaps that system operates independently from the system that listens and unpacks inbound communication. Perhaps we learn things from talking to ourselves because it involves different parts of the brain. I tried to get a sense of what the outbound communication thought might be and how it might differ from inbound thought.
Inbound communication is immediately sent into the associative engines. This step doesn't seem necessary for outbound communication... unless you include the reciprocal activity used to compose thought that is packaged for communication.
There is so much potential here! I really need to think this through more thoroughly. One question I desperately want to answer is why doesn't the reciprocal self talk result in an implicit loop? What is the beginning and end of this activity?
