None of the individual cells in a tree knows that it is part of a tree.
Now I just want to provoke you! :-D How do you know that an individual cell of a tree does not know that it is part of a tree?
That's another thing which I think we often forget that there might be many different forms of consciousness, not just the human brand.
And ever since I read The Secret Life of Plants by Thompson and Bird, I have been very careful about the assumption that plants and animals do not have consciousness, though I agree it is a different kind of consciouness than what we humans experience.
If I remember well, you once wrote that consciousness is the outcome of cellular and chemical activities - or something similar. Wouldn't that be a contradiction - if that is the foundation of consciousness, wouldn't there be consciousness in all cellular structures with chemical activity? :-)
The 100 trillion cells (with selectively permeable membranes) that make up 'you' are all reactive - even the ones that are specialized to make up neural networks. How they react is always local. The 'global' effect (consciousness) is a by-product of these myriad local reactions. You can't be me, I'm taken
Okay, now I have to get get going, some work waiting to be done.
No amount of neural complexity explains the me-ness of my consciousness. (I have no proof of the self-ness of any other entity, even those closest to me... only empirical evidence. Maybe it's just me and a bunch of biochemical robots.)
My personal belief is that all spirituality (in the sense of consciousness separated from biochemistry) is the epitome of wishful thinking. But as Fran says... how can we be sure? It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
My personal belief is that all *spirit*uality (in the sense of consciousness separated from biochemistry) is the epitome of wishful thinking.
Let's do a thought experiment ala Einstein. I get in my time machine, go back 10,000 years (pulling a nice round number out of my voluminous rear-end while I wait for my computer guy to bring back my laptop), and I'm able to talk to a local citizen in any country.
And I ask her (not to be sexist), "Aren't bacteria curious little buggers?" She looks at me like I'm coming on to her (guys are always doing that, regardless of the time) and she says she has never seen or heard of a bacteria. I proceed to tell her that they're tiny living creature all around us, in our mouths, up our butts, but at this point in time there's no technology to detect them. She thinks I'm full of it and walks away, period.
Bottom Line: Scientists, the "What's really real" folks, don't even know what a spirit might be, what it's composed of, NADA. I have NEVER seen the term "spirit" in any science text, not because it necessarily doesn't exist, but because we don't know what it is we would be talking about. In the end, might makes right. Nothing has changed since the caveman.
Another example: Great news. Within the next 24 hours I die from a stroke. You folks see the obituary in the SACBEE; yup, that The Twank, ugly as ever. But I decide to fuck with you folks of little faith. Postings from The Twank continue to show up at ET regardless of how your IT nerds try to stop them? Then what? Expalin THAT! In the end, might makes right. Nothing has changed since the caveman.
Point to someone who is (a) sick and (b) 'done something bad.' Obviously, ya know, they opened themselves up to evil spirits by doing their bidding.
Ex-Twank Communication?
Easy peasy.
You're a very sophisticated Alice-Bot.
:-þ
Anything can be "expalin" by a suitable haze of logomachian bullshit.
"Hello there, I am a meter. I have pride of place on the machine, everyone looks at me, I'm kept clean and I have the manufacturer's name"
"So what do you do?"
"I measure - very scientifically and based firmly on science."
"But do you make any contribution to the process?"
"No, I leave that to others." You can't be me, I'm taken
Now I concede the starting point is not the end point and more research is needed before we can start to utter hard and fast rules about the relationship(s) of neural complexity (pure neurology) and consciousness (pure Mind.)
This article talks about cetacean intelligence. Dolphin's have a large cortical area than us primate brained. I'm not up on the latest research about how less functionally intelligent they are; guess they could be functionally more intelligent than us ... enough that they are intelligent enough to know not to let us know how intelligent they are?
:-)
No idea of the number of connections.
i remember reading once that it was more than all the telephone switchboards and private lines in NYC! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
I'm deeply unhappy with that idea, because it means that (certain specialised) computers will rapidly have far higher degrees of consciçousness than us. If they don't already. It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
I tend to shy away from the discussion:
Organization and "software" matters. A Lot.
Finally, the only "conscious," "intelligent," system we can point to are humans and it's becoming very clear Cognitive ability (frontal lobe processing) depends, to a large extent, on Emotion (limbic lobe processing) and the connections and processing 'twixt and 'tween the two; not only immediately but also processing based on learning, memory, and prediction. Computers, of course, have a fairly good 'Cognitive' memory but are as dumb as a sack of hammers in the other two areas.
So ...
Don't worry. Humans aren't obsolete and we show no signs of being replaced by computers.
If consciousness, as I propose, emerges through the developing complexity of multiple simultaneous 'terminations', then I would further suggest that consciousness is not a reproducible 'state' that could be artificially encoded, i.e. AC or Artificial Consciousness could not reproduce the effect of boot-up lasting a lifetime (though some MS driven computers may show this tendency).
And that the entire journey from 100% noise in the womb to a fair bit of signal in the noise when you leave school, is only accomplished by the effects of the very basic 'wow' and 'ugh' factors. Wow = this feels good, ugh = this feels bad. Wow = gotta remember this so I can do it again. Ugh = gotta remember this so I don't so it again.
Even the sea anemone's 8 neurons are capable of wow and ugh.
Wow and Ugh are both biochemically driven, and the process by which new neural connections are made or reinforced depends on particularly shaped molecules fitting into precise receptors. This is not manageable or reproducible 'data'. You can't be me, I'm taken
Put yourself in the baby's bootees: mum' breast, soft cooing, milk taste and smell, blankies, being held and being warm - these are all synesthesically almost one - to start with. But I imagine (citation needed) that as sensations begin to be 'categorized' or patternized, that 'dialogue' is discovered. "I hear sounds, I make sounds'. The baby is communicating.
And for me, it is communication that leads to enlightenment ;-)
Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880-June 1, 1968) was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.[1][2] The story of how Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become known worldwide through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker.
Not too much later, these phonemes are combined into words and proto-words. "No" seems to be not only easily learned but the most common of all words used in the first stage of verbal communication. :-)
Put yourself in the baby's bootees ...
Not unless, and until, I reincarnate. :-D
Some of the worst papers I've read are Baby Studies claiming all kinds of things ... based on experimenter projection, IMNSHO.
I would say it is communication that leads to mutual acknowledgement of consciousness. So Internet will be recognized as soon as it has its own webpage that spontaneously updates :) A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
video gives a most inadequate brief of what I'm on about.
Yes, but only if the premise is the assumption that consciousness is ONLY a human characteristics.
Perhaps the terms awareness and self-awareness could better be used when attempting to compare human consciousness to that of dogs, sea cucumbers and plants. Plants are known to exhibit functional awareness. Photo-tropism is one of the most basic. They are also known to employ bio-chemical communication that can produce observable responses in adjacent plants, such as in response to herbivores and parasites. (Citation needed.) But these are a long ways from language and self-consciousness. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
I think part of the problem is we are using a term, consciousness, that we identify primarily with human beings, and are applying it to non-human subjects.
Agree. Humans tend to anthropomorphize and project which tends to make the word "consciousness" as much a reflection of the person using the word as the organism or entity being labeled. Also "consciousness" carries historic and Pop-Psychology baggage which quickly turns the conversation into a 'unhelpful' direction and area.
One can test for Awareness and, to some extent, for Self-Reference making them, in my view, more precise thus better.
Animals have a very limited ability to plan, recollect, and abstract, so we tend not to think of them as conscious.
Many Republicans also have a very limited ability to plan, recollect, and abstract, so it's not entirely clear which species they belong to.
The Sapiens part of Homo Sapiens may be unrealistically optimistic in their case.
After a while that gets to be a bit of a bore.
Or at least so argue modern ethologists, such as Frans de Waal. By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan
"Quintessentially Human" stuff is dwindling all the time. Tools, for example, are used/done by spiders, sea otters, chimpanzees, octopi, and other species with varying degrees of cognitive ability, adaption of the tool, adaption to the tool, etc. etc. The one thing Humans can do that other animals don't, to the same degree, is our complex social groupings used to allow us to exist in a diverse range of ecological niches.
