Pondering Agency and Consciousness #BeingHuman

Had a nice exchange about Agency with Paul Burchard on LinkedIn this morning.

My thinking goes towards Agency being a secondary characteristic, definition even, of what we see as a result of senses, perception, intelligence, and consciousness.

Those primary characteristics are from the Buddhist 5 Aggregates (physical form, senses, perception, mental activity, and consciousness).

It was a great exchange, helped me clarify and link my thinking to yesterday’s post on the Perceptron. What Rosenblatt did there was go against the current thinking of creating a system with Symbolic Logic or Boolean Algebra and take a Probabilistic approach.

I find this interesting (though not yet able to fully articulate) as it ties into the domain of consciousness being probabilistic. Which itself fits into the quantum view and the Wave function (which is also a secondary characteristic).

What I can articulate is that Descartes got it the wrong way around. It is “I am, therefore I think” and we should not consider Consciousness (and therefore Agency) as a function of mental activity (including intelligence, language, and reasoning).

#Consciousness #BeingHuman #Agency