A Touch of Grounding

For Dennett “the way to take consciousness, as a phenomenon, seriously” is by investigating other’s User Illusions/consciousness. Assessing the extent of any User Illusion (UI) in infants is nevertheless confounded by the opaqueness of reporting in such others: signalling opportunity for investigation via electromagnetic signs. Such signs are expected to emerge in parallel with the neuro-physiological development of substrates associated with the UI – in algorithmic terms: the virtual machines (VMs) performing nested layers of predictive coding(PC). For Dennett the ‘practice of sharing information in communicative actions with others, giving and demanding reasons, is what creates our personal user-illusions’. This can be interpreted both from evolutionary and developmental perspectives: (a) Our adult brain’s VM substrate arose as evolutionary consequence of memetic selection by such actions; (b) an infant’s UI develops in parallel with its competence to perform such actions. Taking the former as given we consider the latter.

@InProceedings{BB19,
  author       = {Brelstaff, G. and Brelstaff, A.},
  title        = {A Touch of Grounding},
  booktitle    = {Luminous Workshop: Studying, Measuring and Altering Consciousness},
  pages        = {8--11},
  year         = {2019},
  editor       = {Aureli Soria-Frisch},
  publisher    = {Luminous, Barcelona},
  organization = {Luminous },
  address      = {http://www.luminous-project.eu},
  note         = {Workshop: Merton College, University of Oxford, on 21 November  2019.},
  keywords     = {Predictive Coding, Ontological grounding, Infant development, Consciousness},
  url          = {https://publications.crs4.it/pubdocs/2019/BB19},
}