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| Author | Topic: Consciousness, thoughts anyone? | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
What I meant by 'substance' was not like, we could extract someone's consciousness and hold it in our hands, but rather, for consciousness to be caused by some physical system, somewhere right at the end of that causal chain there has to be a 'particle', or a 'field' or a 'wave', or even a 'probability' (covering my quantum bases) that can be pointed at, measured or quantified, which is responsible for consciousness, or IS consciousness. Otherwise if there isn't, we are dealing with a wholly virtual and non real experience; an illusion. I'm not so sure I agree. Would you say that speed is an illusion? There is no speed 'substance' (using your meaning), but I don't think that makes it any less real.
If you refer to consciousness as an emergent property, then it has to be composed of smaller individual parts which combine to create this emergent property, and they would be measured. I am not saying someone will find the 'consciousness particle' which is soully responsible for consciousness, but there must be some interaction between two or more 'things' to produce consciousness if it is an emergent property. Heh... soully... solely... nice unintended pun  The interaction is neurons firing, lots of them. Those are the quantum of consciousness, me thinks.
Catholic Scientist writes: I think of it more as an overarching or encompassing phenomenon, more of a web or network than something being shot out or a discharge. Again, the shooting out or discharging was an analogy to represent how I think of consciousness forming, I doubt there is literally anything shooting anywhere. No, I got you. I was just commenting on your analogy being a little too off for my tastes 
Catholic Scientist writes: Yeah, that, and language. Don't you think in words? If you didn't have words, how much different would your thinking be? I do think language plays a huge part in communication, higher level thought, categorisation, self expression etc. but I don't think it is an essential requirement for consciousness.
Yeah, especially in the sense of consciousness being 'awareness'. A goldfish doesn't need a language to be conscious enough to flee the net that's coming for it. I'll probably tend to conflate consciousness and sentience, as I usually think of this shit in terms of humans' consciousness (which seems to be highly linked to sentience) and fail to consider the other animals who are conscious without sentience.
When you speak, are you at all conscious of how you form the individual phonemes of your words? The are formed in an unconscious network. You may have a conscious intent to express a concept, but to go from concept to understandable content it must be formed in a vast verbal network, which then sends signals to your vocal chords and tells them how to contract, as well as your lungs, tongue, lips. These are all unconscious processes. Good point, taken. I was thinking about sitting around and contemplating and how that effects your consciousness/sentience, i.e. philosophy. That level of consciousness would almost certainly require a language. And if you think back to our evolution from previous apes, and where, before they had language, how much less conscious they would have been and how much harder it would be for a selective pressure to see it. After language develops, and much more complex thoughts can be had, you could really open up for some individuals to make leaps and bounds in their fitness. At least in offspring production and support, setting up a community, etc. I could see how that could really snowball pretty quickly and be a weird evolutionary event. It just seems that how I think of evolution normally occurring would not be the case here.
Sorry about my wording there, I wasn't trying to say that consciousness is like a switch that is turned on and then everything is illuminated. I think, as someone else has said here, that it operates more on a sliding scale, starting from barely conscious to highly conscious. Alrighty then.
Im sure there is still some room on the consciousness scale above us What do you think that would be like? I can't imagine... Know of any sci-fi authors that have attempted it?
so that one would be considered more conscious than us. Not on this planet... yet anyways. And I think we, as humans, are off the charts. Using a scale of 1 to 100, with humans' consciousness being a 100, where would you put the next most conscious animal? I'm thinking less than 50... and depending on how we look at it, even less than, like, 10... You mentioned dolphins, elephants, primates.... Now exclude those few exceptional cases, where would you put the next group down? Like below 20 or something? It depends on how you look at it though. But considering just the discussion that you see on this forum, I don't think there's anything like that at all going on in, say, a dogs mind. Chimps may be thinking some deeper thoughts too, but without a complicated language, I doubt they're "working things out in their head" so much. And in that sense, they're nowhere near us.
That is your belief, and you are entitled to that. I prefer to think that the separation of mind/brain is more conceptual, and once we look close enough, we will be able to pin down how consciousness is formed, and link it to the brain, thereby pinning it to the physical (not necessarily visible, touchable.... but present within our universe, operating under the same physical rules as all other bosonian and fermionic forces/particles. There will be no need to refer to the mind in another 'realm', and it will resolve mind/body duality. Well, removing the need for an explanation doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. And parsimony doesn't necessarily lead to the truth. Pinning consciousness to the brain wouldn't remove the possibility of the soul playing a part.
The thing is, the internet is just an expansive switching board, which wouldn't be so difficult to understand. It is the content, which is contained on the servers which would be impossibly difficult to understand without a monitor, a keyboard, or some way to decode a hard drive and convert the concepts contained within them, into actual usable facts. I get what you are saying though, but the content of the internet is not real, it is just a code, which can be displayed on a screen in a pattern which we may understand. It is that pattern which we need to discover, for our conscious experience is that pattern on that screen. Everything else just allows that pattern to get there. So you've just given me this message, are you saying that the message itself is not real? Just because its reduced to being "simply code", or whatever, doesn't mean that it isn't real. I like the internet analogy of consciousness. Perhaps though, its not that consciousness is the pattern, itself, but it is that accumulation of things that has allowed for the pattern to get there.
Also thought I would add something. I imagine say, a dog's conscious experience to be similar to our own when we are purely within the experience, like when you are playing a sport, driving a car, etc. It is mostly an experience of senses, unconscious reactions, not much conscious intervention. This is how I think about consciousness from a purely conceptual standpoint. There are many other levels of consciousness that have been added, built upon, but when it comes down to it, that is the root of consciousness. Atleast the root of conscious experience that we have anything in common with. Obviously there has to a small degree of conscious intervention for there to be any use to consciousness, and maybe this is how consciousness evolved. Unconscious conditioning can be seen as the precurser to conscious intervention. It is a conditioned response in reaction to a stimulus. Now if that stimulus becomes conscious atleast on a very low level, many other options are made available to an animal, whereas the previous reaction would have been fear and fleeing, they may be able to rationally determine if something is a threat, if it is useful, if it is harmless. Im not sure if dogs have this ability to discriminate on such a level, but I'm trying to explain how different degree's of consciousness could prove advantageous.
Sure. Or think of an early hominid, human ancestor, that doesn't have much of a language. What do you think would be going on in their minds? Would they be higher than just a really smart dog? Another coll thing to look into is feral children. Even modern humans without language skills are pretty different. I wonder what kind of thoughts they might have. Lets see, lately I've been into Chimaira, Devin Townsend (Ziltoid the Omniscient!), Strapping Young Lad, Alice in Chains, Devil Driver, Fear Factory, Opeth, Black Label Society, Mnemic. But then I still love stuff like Satyricon, Necrophagist, Satriani, Steve Vai, Malmstein. Anything awesome really. Alright! Thanks. I'm always looking for more metal that I haven't heard yet
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