I like Hofstadter’s works, but I think he over-focuses on recursion and meta-thinking.
At a much more basic level, we use the word ‘conscious’ to describe the act of being aware of and thinking about something—I was conscious of X.
Some drugs can silence that conscious state, and some (such as alcohol) can even induce a very interesting amnesiac state where you appear conscious but are not integrating long term memories, and can awake later to have no memory of large portions of the experience. Were you thus conscious? Clearly after awaking and forgetting, you are no longer conscious of the events forgotten.
So perhaps our ‘consciousness’ is the set of all mindstuff we are conscious of, and thus it is clearly based on our memory (both long and short term). Even thinking about what you are thinking about is really thinking about what you were just thinking about, and thus involves short term memory. Memory is the key of consciousness, but it also involves some recursive depth—layering thoughts in succession.
But ultimately ‘consciousness’ isn’t very distinct from ‘thinking’. It just has more mystical connotations.
I like Hofstadter’s works, but I think he over-focuses on recursion and meta-thinking.
At a much more basic level, we use the word ‘conscious’ to describe the act of being aware of and thinking about something—I was conscious of X.
Some drugs can silence that conscious state, and some (such as alcohol) can even induce a very interesting amnesiac state where you appear conscious but are not integrating long term memories, and can awake later to have no memory of large portions of the experience. Were you thus conscious? Clearly after awaking and forgetting, you are no longer conscious of the events forgotten.
So perhaps our ‘consciousness’ is the set of all mindstuff we are conscious of, and thus it is clearly based on our memory (both long and short term). Even thinking about what you are thinking about is really thinking about what you were just thinking about, and thus involves short term memory. Memory is the key of consciousness, but it also involves some recursive depth—layering thoughts in succession.
But ultimately ‘consciousness’ isn’t very distinct from ‘thinking’. It just has more mystical connotations.