Can something be ''more conscious'' than we are?
Panpsychism states that consciousness is basically all around. Quarks have a very small degree of consciousness, ants larger and humans much larger. But we could also say that more complex organisms would be more conscious than we are.
But to be honest, I don't know if ''more consciouss'' even makes sense.
But to be honest, I don't know if ''more consciouss'' even makes sense.
Comments (137)
You could say anything theoretically but until you show me one..
It does and it doesn't. Obviously someone about to faint or pass out or having a stroke is less conscious than you or I as it is traditionally defined or at least perceived.
Interesting branch arguments though. A healthy and awake baby is just as conscious as a distinguished PhD performing surgery. Right?
Let's pretend to take that seriously for a moment. What are quarks conscious about?
.....? I have absolutely no idea.
Better question: What does it mean to say a particular quark is conscious?
No, but I think a normal person is just as conscious as a distinguished PhD performing surgery.
You're probably getting way more out of this forum than you are putting into it.
(I don't expect this to go down well.) :scream:
Is there a rule in this sense?
No, you should be fine as long as your follow the Site Guidelines. It's also important to know your rights. :wink:
*hint* You don't have any. :lol:
Really good questions!
Good questions!
I actually find your argument pretty reasonable. But we can apply this vice-versa as well: how come elements with 0 consciousness can form something conscious? I have heard the ''emergent'' theory, but I don't believe in magic.
1. IF quarks are conscious, do they sleep? - no
2. Can they be anesthetized? - no
3. Can they be knocked unconscious by a blow to the... string? - that yes! Kidding.
Maybe there is a ''minimum'' degree of consciousness that cannot be reduced to ''unconsciousness''. Case in which panpsychism is absolutely true.
0 warnings in 3 years. You're worrying too much for me, let the moderators do their job. If they warn/ban me, it means I did something wrong. If they don't, it means those who accused me were wrong. :)
You wake up, don't you? From zero to conscious.
Notice that you can loose consciousness while quarks cannot.
I'm not going with this. It relies on a muddled understanding of consciousness.
Exactly because the matter that my brain is made of has conscious properties. My consciousness is a sum of many irreductible conscious elements, so my consciousness is a state or a combination of those elementary things. When I sleep, that state is no longer there and it re-emerges when I wake up.
Of course, this is definitely just a scenario, but what am I trying to say is that your argument does not exclude the existance of elementary conscious elements, your assumption does. It's like saying "my castle is a pile of bricks, but the bricks lack bricks properties."
Are you "more conscious" now than when you were a child? I know I am. Consciousness is certainly a spectrum.
I find that to be a true moment of inspiration. Great point!
When you sleep, you dream. Are you conscious when dreaming? How do you know when you're unconscious? Even when asleep you are jolted awake by a loud sound or being touched. Are you conscious of loud sounds and a being touched when unconscious? You are only conscious of being conscious, never of being unconscious. Is a neuron conscious?
Most change/growth processes exhibit a rapid initial phase followed by a "decreasing gains" phase. Imagine if you had gone to work in a factory at 18, then at 40 decided to return to school and ended up getting a PhD in political economy. I think in that case you might well experience an expansion of consciousness akin to that of childhood again.
I'm currently reading Dewey's book Human Nature and Conduct: On Social Psychology and Habit. It's a fascinating look at how much of what we think of as our "intelligence" is a function of our habits of social interaction and habits of thought. Break out of your old habits and you will experience a revolution of consciousness......
Yeah...ya gotta wonder about that.
But some really fine minds once posited, "A more perfect Union..."...and that doesn't seem to make much sense either.
Panpsychists apply the term ‘conscious’ very loosely - the idea is that there is a kind of proto-conscious interaction existing to a lesser and lesser degree in less complex systems. I use the term ‘system’ because the kind of panpsychism I am interested in ties in with information theory. But I think it isn’t just a matter of complexity - it’s about integrated systems of awareness, connection and collaboration, which is a particular type of complexity.
I don’t think ‘more conscious’ is particularly helpful, though. Consciousness as it is usually understood has the capacity to occur only within an as yet uncertain range or pattern of integrated complexity, and the level of awareness, connection and collaboration occurring in the system may move it in and out of that range for a number of reasons. What occurs in terms of awareness, connection and collaboration at a less complex (or indeed a more complex) level of integration would need to be something other than ‘consciousness’, in my view.
What does it mean to be conscious, such that more of less of it makes sense? According to one speculative metaphysic, in humans, being conscious is the irreducible necessary condition for the generation of conceptions. That being given, if there is something more conscious than we, it follows that something merely has a greater capacity for generating conceptions, indicating the possibility that something of greater conscious can generate conceptions the lesser conscious cannot, irrespective of congruent experiences. Such being the case, we would never know whether there is something more capable of generating conceptions than we, because the only means to know it, is by the very capacity of which we have the lesser.
Hence, the appeal to a logical condition being “lame”. Not necessarily false but altogether worthless, because its ground is in the fact we already understand there are things seemingly less conscious than we, but that in itself gives us no warrant to quantify the more of something under the same conditions as we warrant the less of it.
The common rejoinder usually takes the form of, say, in the case of an otherwise similar rational entity but one whose sensory input for vision is in the infrared spectrum, will certainly be capable of generating conceptions humans cannot. But this has to do with quality of conscious generations, not the relative quantity of them, which is what the question asks. He is not necessarily more conscious than we, but merely in possession the conscious conceptual capabilities of a different kind. But even that is another lame appeal, insofar as a presupposition of conceptions is granted but not necessarily warranted.
Anyway.....thanks for the interesting question.
Has the cat not, in this case, become "more conscious"? Certainly more "aware," which is to me synonymous.
I share your perception/intuition. I don't think it does make sense. To my mind, nothing is any more conscious than anything else. Consciousness does not come in degrees, just as, (arguably) existence does not come in degrees. For example, we don't say a car has more existence than a rock. They are very different things, but in terms of their existence, they are equal. One does not exist more than the other.
I think Jorndoe has correctly characterised the difference between a person and a super-intelligent alien species of greater cognitive complexity:
Quoting jorndoe
The difference between the conscious minds of different types of entities consists in what they are aware of, what computations they can perform, what things they can perceive, what specialisations their senses may have, how they can reason about their experience, the emotions they can feel, and so on. In terms of their being conscious, they are exactly the same; just as in terms of their existence alone, they are exactly the same. When one says something exists, one has said very little about it. Similarly, when one says something is conscious, one has only said one thing about it. It's really very uninformative about the nature of that thing. On the other hand, if you say something has the mind of a typical human, you have said a great deal about it in terms of what it can do and the kind of experiences it can have.
I have not made arguments here, I am appealing to intuitions about what we typically mean when (in philosophy) we assert that something is conscious.
Let's set out the reductio:
1) Quarks are conscious (panpsychist thesis as target for reductio) (assumption)
2) If quarks are conscious then they can be knocked out, put to sleep (assumption)
3) NOT quarks can be knocked out, put to sleep (assumption)
4) NOT Quarks are conscious (MTT 2.3)
5) Quarks are conscious AND NOT quarks are conscious (& introduction 1,4)
6) NOT Quarks are conscious (RAA 1,5)
Is that right?
I'd just do the reductio on 2 rather than 1
EDIT: fixed spelling
Makes sense.
Quoting bert1
Too complicated for me :))
Setting out arguments always makes them seem more complicated than they are. I just quite like doing it. My point is just that in the sense of 'consciousness' used in this thread, it is not necessary that conscious things must be able to be knocked out.
Yes, exactly. If panpsychism is right and consciousness is fundamental, there's no way you could make a basic element unconscious. The only way is to make it dissapear, if that's possible.
The notion of consciousness is explained by opposing it to unconsciousness. We see the difference between a conscious and unconscious person. It can be applied to animals, at least to some extent. Even computers go to sleep. Perhaps plants sleep through winter. But rocks? Quarks?
Hence, the salient point of the reductio is the rejection of a somewhat derailed notion of consciousness:
Quoting bert1
If you are going to argue that rocks are conscious, you are also going to have to acknowledge and explain your novel use of the word "conscious", because you are not using it int he way it is used in, say, a first aid course.
It's not novel. It's roughly the first sense listed at dictionary.com:
"the state of being conscious; awareness of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc."
I'd want to perhaps cut a couple of those out if I'm talking about the consciousness of rocks, perhaps limit it to just to feelings and sensations, but the basic sense is the same I think. Philosophers put various glosses on this basic idea in order to make it clearer (or less clear for some) what they are talking about. Such glosses talk about experience, qualia (which I dislike), something it is like to be it, subjectivity, having a point of view, and so on.
Your insistence that the medical definition is the only one is very annoying.
This is trivially not true even from an empirical perspective:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_level_of_consciousness
I'm not seeing the difference. The reason we call a knocked-out person 'unconscious' is because they don't appear to have those properties. When they 'come to' again, we mark that they have done so by the apparent return of those properties. If those properties collectively, define conciousness it sounds almost exactly like the medical definition.
Good.
I'm interested to see any evidence you have that a rock has feelings.
Not quite. A healthy baby has delta brain waves. Same as a healthy adult has while asleep.
Panpsychism is true in the vague sense that consciousness can be constructed from common elements, but the metaphysics is bullshit. Its credence relies on materialism's apparent inscrutability. Nothing more. That it's taken seriously seems absurd at this point; progress in computational modelling (Joscha Bach, Anil Seth, etc.) is answering the Hard Problem incrementally. Chalmers, gifted as he is, hasn't been helpful.
Within a materialist paradigm, yes, consciousness exists on a spectrum, but it may be more complicated than it sounds. Consider the case of Washoe, the chimpanzee taught basic sign language: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washoe_(chimpanzee)
Researchers were unable to teach her beyond the level of a pre-schooler, and found she had a genetic learning limitation. The human brain therefore evolved past a cognitive tipping point, which, according to David Deutsch, affords us access to infinite knowledge of concepts, connections. An evolutionary event of some kind triggered the human brain to develop into a different kind of brain altogether. So though humans are objectively speaking more conscious than chimps, measuring beyond the tipping point becomes more subjective.
Accepting the above, it's still tempting to overthink conscious experience into mysticism. But it's probably more rationally intuitive. Human & animal rights have become more empathetic precisely because advances in global communication networks and an increasing number of interconnections with morality principles raised social consciousness as such. The same goes at the individual level, with a major step perhaps being the advent of writing, which allowed concepts to be broadly disseminated. Under this view, consciousness is simply the acute awareness of observable patterns that constitute reality: the more patterns one is able to be aware of simultaneously, the more conscious-feeling they'll probably be.
A supporting--more basic--observation can be found between differing lifestyle orientations. It's been argued that submission to social norms narrows the lateral scope of an individual's conscious awareness over time, that the more embedded in a given living routine one becomes, the less conscious of the world writ large they'll be; and that skepticism and non-acceptance and friction with social constructs promotes greater awareness of reality in general--baring in mind that awareness + attention are synonymous with consciousness, which in a materialist worldview they usually are. Thomas Pynchon had a cool way of framing it:
“Temporal bandwidth, is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar “? t” considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are."
– from Gravity’s Rainbow
Genetically, though, we're only optimised for a limited, socially-margined faculty to develop. One person can be more conscious than the next, but that same person may find themselves more disadvantaged the more conscious they become, especially without the requisite reasoning and decision-making capacity. Basically, the more conscious you are, the more effortful reality is to navigate through.
This is consistent with a common experience of psychoactive drugs: removed from habitual thought processes, conceptualisations are frequently novel in their comparative uniqueness, which sense of uniqueness is proportionate to how far removed from an embedded perspective they are. Hence the phrase "consciousness expanding" -- the extending of an awareness bubble encouraged by psychadelic ventures to the outside. (Fortunately meditation and other healthier practices have similar effect.)
Intelligence and consciousness are interrelated, too; natural fluid intelligence (taking abstraction capacity and creativity into account) reflects a genetic baseline, the extent to which one is able to incorporate new concepts into a functional model. An ability to learn more than average without becoming overwhelmed, affords greater consciousness expansion.
Meaning, it's very possible for a being/AI to be more conscious than any human can be. It would simply need to be simultaneously aware of more moment-relevant concepts than we're capable of.
That the 'feeling' of consciousness is strong enough to infer something inscrutable going on is not a rational argument. Conscious experience is just whatever your attention (and peripheral attention) is focused on, inclusive of thought. If someone or something can be consciously aware of more stuff than us, with wider-reaching well-functioning algorithms, it follows that more evolved organisms can be more conscious than we are.
Side-note: the language faculty has something to do with it. How conscious was Genie, would you say? Was she as conscious as we are? How would it seem jumping into her consciousness and back again? https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/14/genie-feral-child-los-angeles-researchers
^ the differential between language-developed persons and Genie, is perhaps where the crux of the debate rests; i.e. if from the inside of her mind the world appears and feels less vivid, it follows consciousness isn't constant; that it's variable, and evolving, and there's probably superorganisms out there way better at multitasking than us.
EDIT: What I said ^ is wrong. I should have said 'observable behaviour' not 'content'.
What is consciousness if not its content?
And isnt the content dependent upon the type of senses you have? Does more senses at work mean more consciousness for an entity?
What about others who have the same number as senses as I do but aren't as easily awoken when touched or spoken to? Are light sleepers more conscious than heavy sleepers?
I think that there is a correspondence. It isn't adventitious that consciousness emerges along with the complexification of the central nervous system. I think the same process continues at a conceptual level, the more complex our conceptual schema, the more complex the consciousness. It seems intuitive.
The way that birds use their sense of the magnetic field would be different. They use it to navigate, but we can use it to determine the state of Earth's resistance to solar radiation and the state of Earth's core. So does the fact that humans can establish much larger and longer causal relationships with what we are sensing (we seem to have a better grasp of time at least in the long run as most animal's attentions spans are very short) mean that we are more conscious than they? Are humans more conscious of the threats facing this planet and our survival as a species from impending asteroid impacts, nearby supernovas, etc. than other animals? Why or why not? And in this sense is not consciousness just another word for awareness?
While I agree consciousness is its content, and would certainly seem to be variable in degree, do you see that the link you gave doesn’t address that idea? All the table in the link gives, is the relative states of being aware, which has nothing to do with the manifold of representations of which one may or may not be aware. All it details is the relative ability to employ the contents of consciousness, not with whether or not the content is available to employ. I think the title of the link is a misnomer.
But if one wishes to think being aware and being conscious are the same thing, or arise from the same conditions, the table might hold. But they do not, necessarily, so.........
I personally do think awareness and consciousness are synonymous. We are in the arena of definition now, of course.
As I just responded to Mww, I'm of the opinion that consciousness and awareness are the same.
Synonymous, yes, insofar as awareness is taken to be the quality of being aware just as consciousness is taken to be the quality of being conscious, so synonymity is in the category to which they both equally belong. Or even if you want to call it a state of being, or a condition as such, in as much as redness is the state of being red, fitness the state of being fit, so too awareness and consciousness are the respective states of being of each.
But you just informed Harry that you think awareness and consciousness are the same, which is much more than merely synonymous. Case in point, I can be quite conscious, and still be unaware of something....
(How many times have you been so thoroughly engrossed in something that the sound the person beside you made with his speech, left no impression on your ears?)
.....whereas whenever I am aware of anything whatsoever, I absolutely must be conscious simultaneously with it. Therefore, the two would seem to be different in some measurable respect. And if those two are different, then it follows that awareness and consciousness must also be measurably different in a corresponding respect. Perhaps still synonymous by singular category, but significantly disparate in use, occurrence, condition, or something else. Whatever is sufficient to explain such possible difference.
Parsimony suggests awareness is a function of sensibility, consciousness is a function of rationality. With these hypotheticals, the construction of a theory in cognitive science becomes much more internally consistent, hence more efficient.
Not to split hairs, but you can't simultaneously be conscious and unaware of the same thing. You can be conscious of some things and unaware of other things....
How do you account for attention? Attention appears to be an actual process within consciousnes that amplifies certain sensory signals over others. They are still content within consciousness, but arent focused on.
Think about having a conversation in person with a friend and hearing a bird break into song in the background. You may hear the bird, but you aren't listening. You are listening to your friend.
So is consciousness really synonymous with awareness, when there seems to be degrees of awareness within conciousness thanks to the process of attention?
I think the whole concept of attention fits perfectly with the notion that there are degrees of awareness and consciousness. It seems that attention corresponds to a high current degree of awareness. Like self-criticality. There is awareness, and there is self-awareness.
For things to be the same, or even synonymous to a significant reduction, they should really be so under any condition. But they are not, to wit: I am conscious of beauty when I see it, I am aware of things that are beautiful, but beautiful things are not themselves beauty. They merely represent my consciousness of what beauty should be. They are nothing but relative examples of it.
How would I be aware of a thing’s beauty if I didn’t already possess the standard by which to judge it? It follows necessarily that, while I am always conscious of beauty, I am often times completely unaware that a thing is beautiful. To put a split hair on it, I am conscious of beauty, but aware of its negation if a thing is ugly, which makes explicit the beauty of which I am conscious does not belong to the thing of which I am aware.
But that’s not what you’re talking about. You’re talking about not being able to be conscious of and unaware of the same thing at the same time, which presupposes a real object of sense. While this may indeed seem to be the case, it is so only if one thinks being conscious of and being aware of, is the same thing. But, alas....I am always conscious of that of which I am aware, but I am not always aware of that of which I am conscious.
Philosophy is the science of hair-splitting.
I think I’ll restrict attention to the province of awareness, rather than consciousness. While it is possible to be aware of a plurality of things at once, attention is usually thought as being a focus on some part of that general awareness. And I may not even have the object of awareness as a content of my consciousness if I never had any experience with it on the one hand, and never even gave a thought to its possibility, on the other. Yet, there is is, right in front of me, being perfectly aware of it. Whatever it is.
But then, anything I think, whether aware of it or not as a sensed object, cannot be other than at my attention. So there is that.
To be clear, what I said was that
Quoting Banno
...and the examples I gave showed how we could distinguish a conscious human, animal, computer or plant from an unconscious one.
How do you tell when a rock is sleeping?
And if you do not see this question as somewhat absurd, then perhaps that's an end to our discussion.
It seems to me impossible that while you are conscious of beauty you are unaware of beauty. Your approach is to suggest that you have an abstract knowledge called awareness and then failing to find that instantiated therefore no consciousness of awareness. You are begging your own question.
I'll happily stipulate that we do have such background knowledge and awareness, but all that says is that we are aware "that there is such a thing as beauty." And while we are aware of that, we are also conscious...of that.
The medical definition talks about levels of responsiveness in humans. The definition is in terms of behaviour, and we assume that these behaviours are accompanied by corresponding characteristically human experiences.
But we don't have to limit the use of 'consciousness' (even partly defined in terms of behaviour) to humans. We can wonder, for example, if the responsive behaviour of rocks is evidence of their subjective experience.
The definition of 'consciousness' (sense 1 in most dictionaries) is distinct from the medical definition in that it does not include any specific behaviour and speaks in very general terms about 'sensations', 'feelings', 'experiences' which are not, by definition, tied to any particular species, and even plants and minerals are not ruled out. If we want to say rocks are not conscious in this sense, we can't just appeal to a definition. We need a theory.
On the definition of 'consciousness' you are using, we are in complete agreement. Rocks are unconscious in that sense. This definition entails the possibility of sleep and being knocked out and so on. These conditions are defined in terms of brain function. Rocks, by definition, do not have brains. Therefore rocks, by definition, are not conscious in this sense. We agree.
Panpsychism is therefore wrong, by definition. Is that right?
Brain function? No. I don't have to examine my cat's brain function to tell that it is sleeping.
I would get on board with that.
From a specific definition of consciousness that I agree with. I have nothing to say about other possible definitions. You're okay.
Simple, really: I’m unaware of beauty when I don’t think a thing I’m aware of is beautiful. What right would I have to think that, if I didn’t already have an understanding of how beauty is represented in me? Being unaware of beauty just means the thing I’m aware of doesn’t meet some personal standard for it.
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Quoting Pantagruel
It would seem that way, yes, if being aware and being conscious are taken to mean the same thing. The logical error disappears if they are considered to stand as separate and very distinct theoretical domains.
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Quoting Pantagruel
Cool. “Background” tacitly understood to indicate that of which one is not immediately aware. So you’ve kindasorta acquiesced to the validity of two separate and distinct domains. YEA!!!
It wouldn't count as 'evidence' of anything. You just redefined the term to include it.
If you say "subjective experience could be defined to include the sort of things rocks have", then obviously the responsive behaviour of rocks will be evidence of it.
I could say red hair was evidence of insanity if I redefine 'insanity' to include all people with certain forms of the MC1R gene. But what would be the point?
The point of having a definition we can actually measure is that we can make use of it "is the patient concious?", "he was knocked unconscious", "were you concious at the time?". What possible use could it be to define conciousness as some property which is completely undetectable?
We don't have to define consciousness' in terms of the behaviour of rocks, and I wouldn't normally do so. The definition (sense 1) is rock-neutral. We'd need a theory to link it to rocks. My panpsychist theory is that nothing could happen without consciousness: matter does what it does because of how it feels. Therefore if a rock does anything, including existing, that constitutes evidence of consciousness.
Consciousness is detectable to the person that has it. And they may want to refer to this using a word.
But if they're speaking, they've already satisfied the original definition, so it's not serving any purpose not already met.
Right... So rocks are concious, but things which speak aren't?? This theory is getting more and more bizarre.
So perhaps I should have said 'speaking does not entail consciousness by definition'
Right. So back to my question then. Someone wishing to speak of their own conciousness is already concious, even by the medical definition (although, as you say, their speech ability does not define their consciousness). In all other potential cases it is impossible to distinguish concious from unconscious - indeed, everything is concious you say. So what's the use of the word?
This is really interesting. Ask me if I am conscious and I will say, "yes". Ask a zombie if he is conscious and he will either say "no", or not respond.
Indeed. That is why philosophers are so exercised about the problem of other minds. Some theorise that nothing is conscious, some that some things are conscious, others that everything is conscious.
Quoting Isaac
To talk about which things we think are conscious, for example. Also to wonder about the experiences of other things. Consider:
John "I wonder what it's like to be a snail."
Jack: "Don't be silly, there's nothing it is like to be a snail. They're not conscious. Their brains aren't big enough to generate experience."
Yes, that is interesting. I'm not sure what a zombie would say (although speculating about what things would or wouldn't say in a thought experiment is a bit rarefied!). Your take intuitively makes sense though.
Scientists need to create a non human zombie that can talk! Mystery solved! :party:
But you said everything is concious. Jack's assertion wouldn't make any sense under that definition. Jack's assertion would only make any sense if there were some measurable difference between being concious and not, but you're saying that everything is concious, therefore there's no way one could exist, but not be concious.
I can't think of any use for such a term. What's more, we're definitely still going to want to differentiate between the level of awareness humans etc demonstrate and that demonstrated by rocks. So we're just going to need a new word to do exactly the job 'conciousness' does presently, whilst at the same time the original word becomes entirely useless. Why not just use the word as it already is?
It would make sense (because panpsychism is not true or false by definition) but it would happen to be factually wrong (if panpsychism is true) or factually right (if panpsychism is untrue)
Are you sure you are adequately distinguishing theory from definition?
Quoting Isaac
Panpsychism does not entail that non-consciousness is incoherent, just that it, in fact, does not occur in the world. For a panpsychist, a non-conscious object would be one that cannot experience. The sentence makes sense. For a panpsychist, there just aren't any of those objects.
Measurability is indeed a problem. If consciousness (sense 1) were measurable then we could settle this matter by doing some experiments. And this also explains the appeal to many philosophers (perhaps Banno is among them) of definitions in terms of measurable behaviour. That would help a great deal in settling the question. When I get jumpy is when philosophers (or anyone) try to insist that definitions that do not involve observable measurement should be discarded. Interestingly, the online Cambridge Dictionary does just that - I couldn't see (when I looked a month or two ago) a definition of 'consciousness' that talked only in terms of subjectivity! Newspeak!
Quoting Isaac
Sure, that is a huge problem, and one which dogs these forums. The problem is that there exist half a dozen or more different senses of the same word. I agree that the medical definition is very useful. And indeed much more useful on a daily basis than the definition philosophers of mind often want to talk about.
Very heavy! And in my opinion this raises the following question: CAN THERE BE CONSCIENCE WITHOUT SENSES? Maybe consciousness is the sense of your existence?
But isn't this like saying there is a potential for ''infinite consciousness''? I mean I know about my own existence, I know that there is a huge universe there, maybe infinite or even an infinite number of different multiverses. I can imagine less than that, for example just feeling primary needs like hunger but having no idea about the universe and not even about the implications of my own existence. On the other hand, it is hard for me to contemplate ''more'' could mean. Is there more to be conscious of?
Let me bring an argument for panpsychism:
No, a robot wouldn't have more consciousness than a rock. No, my own hand isn't conscious.
In my opinion, panpsychism want to say this: elementary particles have a very small degree of consciousness, but only certain combination of atoms can ''conduct'' consciousness and unite the consciousness of particle with that of another particle forming a stronger consciousness. So, if there's no connectivity inside a rock due to the property of atoms forming that rock, than the rock, as a conscious entity doesn't exist.
And your friend was never the same again. :lol: I truly admire your style of being simple in bringing arguments, I am a simple man myself. But sometimes I really think you intentionally hide things in order to make your arguments plausible.
The jellyfish can be conscious without going to sleep and without having the characteristics of a sleeping creature.
That's certainly one variety of panpsychism, probably the most popular. One way to determine which systems have 'united' the consciousness of their individual particles is to hijack the IIT theory and say that it is just those systems that integrate information, which is an interesting possibility. (This is a different take on the IIT model, which identifies consciousness with integrated information. The view I just said is the idea that integrated information is not itself consciousness, but it does define which things are conscious individuals, and determines the richness of experience they are capable of.)
What is it that would allow you to conclude that a Jellyfish is conscious? What observation?
I'm not sure consciousness is a quantity, but quality is a useful way of putting it. The contents of consciousness involve a quantity of concepts, which quantity has influence on consciousness quality.
Intelligence plays a role in the formation of functional algorithms related to the concepts we learn. Chimps are far less intelligent than we are, and so they're both limited by a comparably low number of concepts, and the degree to which their learning can be intelligently used.
The video below is 10min long. worth a look. A eukaryotic cell is poked with a human hair. Initially it recoils. When that dose not work it decides to get out of there. it finds a new suitable environment, and proceeds to continue life. In the process it shows awareness of pain, decision making, memory - it dose not return to the same place.
I would hypothesize it is a qualia based consciousness. Qualia is polar / directional ( repelled from pain and attracted to pleasure). It is enough for consciousness. I would further hypothesize that qualia is still the dominant quantity of human consciousness. Qualia is necessary for consciousness. Reason is not. Reason alone creates a zombie.
Do you have qualia of your pupil contracting in bright light?
Folk will see consciousness everywhere, if they so choose. It perhaps gives an indication of their capacity for critical thought.
Sleep is a form of suspended consciousness, not fully unconscious, as in anesthesia.
Reflex is a single movement. You cant apply that argument to the above video. That is a complex purposeful sequence of actions.
The below video shows a white blood cell chasing bacteria, note the footage is in a petrie dish - out of body no brains involved. 2min long.
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1. Consciousness, in a very broad sense, is about awareness, awareness of the outer (all things except the self) and the inner (the self) worlds. The former type of consciousness appears to be very basic - even ameba are capable of sensing and responding to their environs which fits the description of consciousness as awareness of the outer. The other half - self-awareness - is unlikely to be present in an ameba for the reason that self-awareness appears to be an inference i.e. knowldege/awareness of the self is a conclusion to an argument which might take the following form:
i). Thinking going on and experiencing the physical
ii). We become aware of thinking and experiencing the physical
iii). We infer: there's something that's thinking (a thinker) and experiencing (an experiencer). This thinker/experiencer = self. Now the thinker/experiencer realizes/becomes aware of himself/herself/itself
It seems that all beings who are self-aware construct this short but good argument in their heads. It's Descartes' cogito ergo sum if you didn't notice it already.
2. Some have posited that consciousness can be of different levels. Clearly an amebic fully outer-oriented awareness is a type of consciousness that can be thought of as less than human consciousness that's capable of both outer and inner awareness.
As to the possibility of consciousness beyond human level consciousness, there doesn't seem to be a legitimate domain, apart from the inner and outer worlds, to expand awareness into. However, some may be of the opinion that advancing toward, what some claim, the true nature of reality which will probably include perfect understanding of the outer and inner worlds, qualifies as progressing through different levels of consciousness.
Yeah but probably not by equating those with wakefulness and sleep. As you say, even computers sleep. But are they conscious when awake?
A sense of consciousness (enabling modern English speakers to coherently use the word "conscious" and perhaps pre-moderns the word "sentient"? I dunno) arises from our ability to think and talk with symbols, wherein we continually (and harmlessly) confuse thoughts (brain shivers), symbols (words and pictures) and objects. The confusion may be fleeting, or persist into our thinking and talking about the inter-relation of the three.
(The alleged illness) Schizophrenia has often been characterised as an excess of consciousness.
But that is an experience of consciousness and unconsciousness of which we all have first person experience. Moreover it is a clear example of a difference, a change, between the two states. There are ways of distinguishing conscious things form unconscious things.
A computer can sleep, and that's something we could discuss. But not a rock.
Experience truly is consciousness. We experience consciousness. We have a conscious experience.We cannot have an unconscious experience, nor an unexperienced consciousness.
In humanity, consciousness is somthing that develops over a lifetime. In early teens we become aware of self, but do we ever become self aware? To be truly self aware we have to understand our own consciousness – not just have knowledge of it, and this is a tough ask. Yet who would state that somebody experiences less because they are less aware? Who would state children experience less then adults? How can we know other creatures have less of an experience then we do?
Fair enough. A rock can't even be awake, [I]let alone[/i] conscious. :up:
Methodologically speaking we would better to work out what each of these is and how they relate.
Otherwise we run the risk of doing no more than constructing just-so stories.
What is conflated?
There seem to be other conflations, left unclear. But... my reaction is basically the incredulous stare mentioned int h Stanford article. Panpsychism does not strike me as workable. And nothing said here has changed that opinion. Instead the thread seems dependent on credulity.
This part is relevant to your original question, i dont know what the rest is all about.
I did go to some trouble to explain this. I'll try again:
Every experience is a conscious one. Every state of consciousness must be experienced.
Consciousness and experience are inseparable - you cannot have one without the other.
When we speak of consciousness we usually think of reasoned awareness.
When we speak of experience we usually think of emotional awareness.
If we knew we could tell if a rock is conscious!
Quoting Pop
But it won't work with rocks. That's my point.
So what is most conscious in the universe?
edit: Is a rock a part of the universe?
yes... speculation...
I'm sure you can think of a better word.
b) Panpsychism is wild speculation.
c) Panpsychism is a wild conjecture.
d) Panpsychism is wildly misguided.
[s]e) Not wild.[/s]
f) None of the above.
[s]g) Fuck this assignment.[/s]
Which answer is most correct?
Your argument makes sense and I admit I haven't thought about this so far. Thank you!
Quoting Pop
I think this is a trap! I think panpsychism sees a rock as a non-consciouss entity, but rather a physical object made of many elementary entities, each one containing consciousness properties. But the material that makes a rock doesn't have ''conductivity'' properties, so the consciousness of each elementary pparticle does not connect with other in order to form something bigger in that sense,
Yes, but that doesn't mean it has no potential to reveal truths.
What 'truths' do you want to be revealed?
Until they come up with a viable scientific experiment, nothing is going to be revealed by panpsychism. It's a pretty much useless theory as it stands.
I don't see it like this. Yes, it is just a theory and it does not claim it is more than that. Even if it has no empirocal evidence yet, it has a strong logic behind.
Suppose it does have "strong" logic behind it, it doesn't make it any more useful than the theory of the luminiferous ether, or reincarnation for that matter.