Consciousness and its Kinds
Often, we end up doing lots of dumb things while in real sense we are smart and intelligent. This situation is well explained by studying consciousness. Consciousness is defined as being awake and aware of the things taking place around us as well as the things that are taking place in our bodies. With reference to Jim Davies class notes on consciousness, he defines and explains three different kinds of consciousness. The first one is consciousness of being awake, the consciousness of oneself and the consciousness of something like being aware of traffic changing colour to say green. The consciousness of self-enables a person to be aware of the thoughts they are going through as well as their actions. In his book The Robot's Rebellion: Finding meaning in the age of Darwin, Keith E. Stanovich explores the human capability to think consciously while not necessarily having to practice as it happens in artificial intelligence situations in the case of robots.
Atomization and its Effects
Among his categories of consciousness, Stanovich explains atomization. In his lecture notes Jim Davies has defined atomization as something that becomes well if we repetitively continue doing. At the same time, the thing gets easier and faster for an individual to complete. Accordingly, Jim Davies notes that when we repetitively do the same activity, we get used to them and our minds are less conscious of the activity. Normally, once a person becomes aware of the things we are doing, the possibility of messing up increases more than the possibility of doing the thing right. For example, an automation activity is training to ride the bicycle. Usually, after a person learns to balance on top of the bike, how to pedal and steer, they tend to forget reminding themselves of the requirements of learning how to ride a bike. Getting to ride the bike more times while not reminding our bodies enables a person to become automatic at it and this makes us be less careful hence there is a high likelihood of messing up.
Intuition in Decision Making
In his book, Stanovich writes about a proposal by Khaneman and Tversky (200) that people lack a stable and well-ordered preference in situations of making choices among different critical options. For example, when a person is choosing which house to buy, the likelihood of their minds being changed by an irrelevant situation is high like the colour of the house or the thought of that the house may be similar to another house in the neighborhood. The decision between whether to buy the house or not depending on the number of alternatives that present in a person's mind depend upon the number of alternatives the person has on their mind and the nature in which they respond to the alternatives available. In other words, this choice depends on the intuition of the person and presents differently from one person to another. According to the lecture notes by Jim Davies on consciousness, intuition determines our decisions and believes in something yet we may have no opinion of how the idea came to be. While a person is torn between the decision of buying or not buying a house, the thought that the decision that they should make the choice based on colour come in as an alternative opinion which had not been thought of earlier on. An incidence like this is associated with automatization and may be due to the possibility that we are aware of the way we are thinking something that can be changed if we practice to think differently or experience new environments.
The Autonomous Set of Systems (TASS)
In the second chapter of The Robots Rebellion, the article titled Dennett (1991, 178, citing Humphrey 1993) explains how The Autonomous Set of Systems (TASS) has been programmed to adapt to our present environment. The adaptation is done by signaling Artificial Intelligence program to inform a male to in the site to mate with a woman. The machine achieves this by judging that since this particular male is in adulthood stage, then he is required to have a mate who should definitely become a spouse so that together they can bear children. The AI system is capable of adapting the requirements of males the age he is in so that it can predict what will occur in future. Just like human beings think through getting female mates at adulthood or teenage who will definitely become spouses and a marriage takes place thereafter where children will be born, the same way the machines can be trained to think like humans. If a machine is trained the wrong way, it shall be used to that way and as such predict the wrong information. Likewise, human beings would make the wrong things and end up doing the dumb things if they are used to a process of doing things the wrong way.
The Importance of Conscious Thinking
Therefore, just like machines can be taken through a training program to learn to do something Stanovich, reveals that humans have a conscious way of thinking. As such, one has to train themselves in a way that they are able to be conscious in the right way of the surroundings around them as well as self so that they can lead a safe life.
References
Davies, J. (2014, October 7). CGSC 1001 Mysteries of the Mind, Cognitive Biases: Carleton University.
