Ah. Ok.
After “conscious” and “awake” the same thing? That is often what is meant. But do they ever mean different things?
I think they are the same thing, as long as the awake being responds to you when asked “How are you?” or “What’s up?”
The being will respond, “I’m good, just taking some rest.” or “I am mulling over something.”
If the being seems awake, but saying nothing to your asking, or look lost with silence, then maybe the being is not conscious? Even if looks conscious.
The sign of being conscious is being able to interact and respond intelligibly and expectingly.
The response and interaction of the conscious being will show far more than the verbal expressions.
It will display the emotions in the facial expression (smiling or tight lipped, half closed eyes or brightly shinning eyes peering back into you etc), the hand waving and also the movement of body etc all accounts for the sign of being conscious.
It is definitely tricky to put boundaries around what consciousness is, and when something is or isn’t conscious. The fact that awareness seems to have evolved progressively in biological entities complicates the idea of consciousness as a binary state. Can a human being be said to have more consciousness than a chimpanzee, a chimpanzee more consciousness than a lizard, a lizard more than a fish?
When we sleep and have dreams, and there is some level of brain activity associated with this. Sleeping is therefore not a lack of unconsciousness in the same way that total brain death is. Also, if someone dies very slowly one portion of the brain at a time, at what point does consciousness actually end? When the neocortex shows no activity? When the brain stem becomes inactive?
Patterner’s description of consciousness being inherent in matter (I think that’s what you are saying, but I may be mistaken) seems plausible. A pansychist model would suggest that conciousness can be expressed to more or less of a degree depending on the systematic complexity into which the atoms are organized. As far as I know, however, there is no concrete evidence that would suggest that this model is more likely to be true than alternative ideas.
It is not about more consciousness. They are different complexity and level of consciousness.
Chimpanzee’s consciousness is not in the same complexity and level as that of worms or lizard or fish.
You wouldn’t expect fish or worm to be able to grab banana and throw at you like chimps do when they are angry.
Well no, you assume consciousness in humans and animals. An so far there is no mechanism discovered for how the brain does it.
The above is relevant to this thread, though I’m not sure how well made the thought process to it is.
Brain is certainly the centre of mental operations, but it doesn’t tell how it does it. All we know is, it does it.
All I can tell about consciousness is, it is a quality of biological life and living being.
My personal take that seems to resolve most of these issues is that the self is the totality of our conscious identity, and our subconscious nature as an evolving process, in addition to the impact we leave on the world around us for others to know us by, and the location in spacetime which we occupy. The matter we are made of and the energy we use is also relevant but is not necessary for the existence of the self as this is prone to change. No single one of these things defines who we are but rather the totality of all of it defines us just as much as we define it.
It doesn’t seem that way to me. We only have various guesses on what consciousness is, and how it exists at all
My guess is that consciousness - the capacity to subjectively experience - is always present in all things. Evolution makes many changes to life. When a new arrangement of matter is amenable to consciousness, it is more likely to be selected for.
I think consciousness is unary.
You are not mistaken.
I agree.
True. I know of no concrete evidence for any model.
Is your understanding of the idea of this reply to you physical? If it is not, it is something non physical that emerged from physical components (your device).
My understanding, as opposed to the physical events of photons hitting my retina in certain patterns and frequencies, setting off many physical events in my optic nerve and brain, such as ions entering and neurotransmitters exiting neurons, is due to consciousness. And I experience those physical events as a green circle with an H insider as your symbol, a blue rectangle for the Reply button, etc. These things are unexplainable in terms of those physical events. Why do those events not take place “in the dark”, as Chalmers put it?
But you made a distinction earlier between using the same or different atoms, and described it as “tricky” and “a problem” applying it to humans. Now it apparently doesn’t matter whether it’s the same atoms or not and the solution is very simple?
Please stop trying to relitigate the PMs in this thread.
My takeaway from that exchange was very different to yours, but, by design, nobody here can read those messages, so it is pointless to drag that out here.
Not at all; we can discuss criteria for life, and that is also an interesting philosophical (and biological) topic. I don’t share a desire to reflexively answer questions with an off-the-cuff guess.
So be it. My desire first and foremost is to embrace reality – that includes admitting when we don’t know something. But as well as that, developing concrete models is light years ahead of just guessing. Because models are useful.
Today it doesn’t matter that we have no good model of continuity, but there likely will be a day when we can splice, or augment, or duplicate minds (at least partially). And it would be good if we had some idea of what that will entail for continuity.
And not just a guess that is countered by someone else’s guess that’s opposite ours.
For the record, I didn’t make that claim. I said that of the three propositions that I listed, the “no continuity” one looks strongest because, so far, no-one has come up with any counter-arguments for it, whereas psychological continuity and bodily continuity both have known problems.
I think we’re talking about multiples topics. Whether or not I die when my atoms are separated is not the same question as whether or not the consciousness present after you reassemble the atoms into exactly the same arrangement is the same consciousness as the one from before the separation.
Instead of trying to tackle the Hard Problem, lets look at something more tractable. I’m attempting to communicate something, some kind of idea with this post. Call it i. i has entered your awareness by reading this post, albeit modified by your own understanding and interpretation. So really there is a new i in your mind you have created by reading and interpreting. Call it i2.
I think we agree that i2 is not physical. Where did it come from? From what did it arise?
I don’t see how i2 can be discussed without the Hard Problem. i2 would not exist without consciousness. There would only be electrical signals (in the form of ions passing through cell membranes) in my brain.
I2 wouldn’t exist without consciousness. But it also wouldn’t exist without the post. Moreover, it doesn’t seem right to say that i2, or at least i, resides in your consciousness. It is something your consciousness apprehends, which is external to it.
Another example: Great Expectations is not physical. It is a particular canonical sequence of words. It is a story, with events, characters, and themes. It is a shared cultural notion which can be discussed. None of this is physical. But it all arises from something physical: a particular, physical book.
I have a principle which excludes the cloning case but not incremental replacement:
If it is even logically possible for the original to be preserved and meet the clone, then the clone cannot be the original.
The reasoning is, if it were the case that the original was preserved, and meets the clone, then the original would know damn well that the clone was not them. So then, in any hypothetical scenario where it is merely a contingent fact that the original is not preserved, believers in continuity have a very difficult problem. They would have to believe that continuity depends on the contingent fact that the original is gone. Then, at best, “continuity” is a heuristic: “you are the original, unless someone closer happens to come along”.
Agreed. It didn’t pop into my thoughts for no reason. You put it there, via your post.
I don’t think consciousness is a thing, or place, in which ideas reside. However, I think I get the idea. Not sure how much I agree. At the moment I’m thinking whichever i you want to talk about, it is in my mind. When I ask not thinking i, where do you think i exists?
Certainly. The physical and consciousness are partners. I don’t even experience red without the physical events beginning with photons hitting my retina, much less have thoughts about something as complex as Great Expectations without the input of Dickens’ thoughts via reading, or listening to a reading of, his book, watching the movie, or whatever.
Well evidence would suggest that, but again it’s not a sure thing.
Even saying it’s the quality of biological life and living being isn’t right, especially since we can’t really define life too well.