Is consciousness restricted to intelligence?

[Murad]

What is consciousness? ...An enigma of existence? An elevated sense of awareness?
Is consciousness restricted to any other variable? (Magnitude of Intelligence/Brain etc...)

& here is my final wacky question:

Do you believe the human "conscious" can be analysed using our "conscious", or is that like analysing a microscope with a microscope?


That is all

[Furrowed Brow]

What is consciousness?

Consciousness is not that easy a concept to define. I’d go with something like: subjective experience.

...An enigma of existence?

It is puzzling.

An elevated sense of awareness?

No. I don’t think it is elevated if you are implying dualism or it is a special feature of nature that appears once an organism achieves some critical level of complexity.

I think the experience of consciousness is as vague and as complex as the subjects interactions with the world. So a bat is conscious, maybe not as we would experience it, but still consciousness. I suspect that any organism with its own propulsion system can be called conscious. So even some bacteria would count as consciousness on that scale....except there is no reason to suspect the experienced is as rich as say being a snail. Maybe to be a snail is a sensual feast or maybe it is more like blotches of light and dark in the static.

Anyhow...viewed this way consciousness is not special or elevated. Though it is still an enigma.

[Murad]

I think the experience of consciousness is as vague and as complex as the subjects interactions with the world. So a bat is conscious, maybe not as we would experience it, but still consciousness. I suspect that any organism with its own propulsion system can be called conscious. So even some bacteria would count as consciousness on that scale....except there is no reason to suspect the experienced is as rich as say being a snail. Maybe to be a snail is a sensual feast or maybe it is more like blotches of light and dark in the static.

Anyhow...viewed this way consciousness is not special or elevated. Though it is still an enigma.

I agree that its an enigma & i believe its always going to be an enigma (unless the movie inception becomes true in the future ) I do agree that all animals have a "type" of consciousness, but obviously homo sapiens have a unique consciousness which i suspect is the result of our high intelligence when compared to other animals.

Why do you believe a "propulsion system can be called conscious"?

[Furrowed Brow]

Why do you believe a "propulsion system can be called conscious"?

Well I would not word it that way. I don’t think a boat or a motor car is conscious.

The problem as I see it is locating some criteria to indentify the individual subject. I don’t think there is much question that organism with brains and nervous systems experience something and thus have some degree of consciousness; and for a time I thought this was the critical threshold. On that view anything without a brain or nervous system could not be conscious. But lately I have changed my opinion on the basis I drew the line for lack of being able to imagine what it was like to be a bacteria.

The problem for a physicalist like myself is that “consciousness� cannot be an extra non physical ingredient in the universe. Whilst folk conceptually separate mind and body and talk as if they are two things this is just a way of talking: our ready compulsion to see the mind as separate from the body on this view issues from how we form narratives and talk about ourselves and our motives for action and not from the underlying physical reality. So “the mind� is really a trick of language. Yet to be true consciousness does have its subjective enigmatic qualities.

I have come to the opinion that consciousness is a messy, not uniform, not a single thing or mode of experience or mechanism. There is not an essential inner me. The only thing that separates my consciousness from my environment is my physical body and its ability to respond to stimulus and negotiates its environment and my brains and nervous systems ability to recall previous interactions.

The subjective qualities of consciousness are the puzzle. Tackling that puzzle as a physicalist sends the enquiry in a particular direction. If the qualities of consciousness are not dualistic then the basic components...the “bits� of consciousness are physical and built into the fabric of nature. So on this view it does not make sense to say consciousness is not physical or that the experience of consciousness as it is experienced is not physical. (Can you see how language begins to get in the way).

I do not subscribe to and strongly eschew pantheism, panpshycism and animism. I do not believe the universe is conscious, or that being conscious entails having a spirit. I do believe however that all matter has the qualities that are the precursors to phenomenal consciousness but I do not believe there is some subjective experience of what it is like to be a rock because a rock does not in any sense negotiate its environment i.e. rocks do not do anything for themselves. Similarly machines or computers are not inherently conscious.

The criteria of a propulsion system is just meant as one rule of thumb that works for me, there are probably other things that need to be added to the list e.g. a digestive system, reproductive mechanisms, self replication, any kind of stimulus detection system, energy conversion systems and so on. I don’t think an organism needs all these to count as conscious. All that is needed for there to be an individual is for the bunch of molecules that form some lump of matter to distinguish itself from all the other molecules that constitutes its environment. A propulsion system is indicative but not a guarantee of this. If a bunch of molecules cannot detect an energy source, or a noxious stimulus, or a mate, or react to stimulus then it is not conscious. If it manages just one of these then it is conscious. On this view a rock or a motor car are not conscious. However a motorcar that drove itself and responded to stimulus and could if it bumped into one recognise an Esso garage then it could be compared to a bacteria. A tree would on some level be conscious too. But as to what it means to be a tree or a bacteria I can only guess at, and suspect it is a very empty and poor view of the universe than that experienced by those with brains and nervous systems. So I would not anthropomorphise trees and plants and bugs.

OK I'll stop with the wack stuff.

[Ragna]

What is consciousness? ...An enigma of existence? An elevated sense of awareness?

It's hard to define, but I would say both. However, I like to think of consciousness as gradual. Where do we draw the line? Fish are conscious? Flies? Worms? Jellyfish? Sponges?

Is consciousness restricted to any other variable? (Magnitude of Intelligence/Brain etc...)

I think you have it reversed. Intelligence is a product of consciousness, and so consciousness might or might not include intelligence when we can get to define both. What kind of intelligence are you talking here? Human, monkey intelligence? Dog intelligence? And by consciousness you mean self-awareness?

& here is my final wacky question:

Do you believe the human "conscious" can be analysed using our "conscious", or is that like analysing a microscope with a microscope?


That is all

I guess it can. How valid or what angle the interpretation has is what might be less satisfying. What's wrong with analyzing microscopes with microscopes?

[bernee51]

I do agree that all animals have a "type" of consciousness, but obviously homo sapiens have a unique consciousness which i suspect is the result of our high intelligence when compared to other animals.

I think you have it back to front, the potential for the high intelligence high intelligence of homo sapiens is a direct result of an evolved self reflective consciousness.

Consciousness is not a static point - it is a continuum - a spectrum

[james.hoggatt]

Why do you believe a "propulsion system can be called conscious"?

Well I would not word it that way. I don’t think a boat or a motor car is conscious.

The problem as I see it is locating some criteria to indentify the individual subject. I don’t think there is much question that organism with brains and nervous systems experience something and thus have some degree of consciousness; and for a time I thought this was the critical threshold. On that view anything without a brain or nervous system could not be conscious. But lately I have changed my opinion on the basis I drew the line for lack of being able to imagine what it was like to be a bacteria.

The problem for a physicalist like myself is that “consciousness� cannot be an extra non physical ingredient in the universe. Whilst folk conceptually separate mind and body and talk as if they are two things this is just a way of talking: our ready compulsion to see the mind as separate from the body on this view issues from how we form narratives and talk about ourselves and our motives for action and not from the underlying physical reality. So “the mind� is really a trick of language. Yet to be true consciousness does have its subjective enigmatic qualities.

I have come to the opinion that consciousness is a messy, not uniform, not a single thing or mode of experience or mechanism. There is not an essential inner me. The only thing that separates my consciousness from my environment is my physical body and its ability to respond to stimulus and negotiates its environment and my brains and nervous systems ability to recall previous interactions.

The subjective qualities of consciousness are the puzzle. Tackling that puzzle as a physicalist sends the enquiry in a particular direction. If the qualities of consciousness are not dualistic then the basic components...the “bits� of consciousness are physical and built into the fabric of nature. So on this view it does not make sense to say consciousness is not physical or that the experience of consciousness as it is experienced is not physical. (Can you see how language begins to get in the way).

I do not subscribe to and strongly eschew pantheism, panpshycism and animism. I do not believe the universe is conscious, or that being conscious entails having a spirit. I do believe however that all matter has the qualities that are the precursors to phenomenal consciousness but I do not believe there is some subjective experience of what it is like to be a rock because a rock does not in any sense negotiate its environment i.e. rocks do not do anything for themselves. Similarly machines or computers are not inherently conscious.

The criteria of a propulsion system is just meant as one rule of thumb that works for me, there are probably other things that need to be added to the list e.g. a digestive system, reproductive mechanisms, self replication, any kind of stimulus detection system, energy conversion systems and so on. I don’t think an organism needs all these to count as conscious. All that is needed for there to be an individual is for the bunch of molecules that form some lump of matter to distinguish itself from all the other molecules that constitutes its environment. A propulsion system is indicative but not a guarantee of this. If a bunch of molecules cannot detect an energy source, or a noxious stimulus, or a mate, or react to stimulus then it is not conscious. If it manages just one of these then it is conscious. On this view a rock or a motor car are not conscious. However a motorcar that drove itself and responded to stimulus and could if it bumped into one recognise an Esso garage then it could be compared to a bacteria. A tree would on some level be conscious too. But as to what it means to be a tree or a bacteria I can only guess at, and suspect it is a very empty and poor view of the universe than that experienced by those with brains and nervous systems. So I would not anthropomorphise trees and plants and bugs.

OK I'll stop with the wack stuff.

I'll think there is a lot to the idea that consciousness is made up of two parts 1) Semantics and 2) Synapses. The synapses of the thought process is a series of chemical reactions that can be nearly identical when thinking radically different things. The Semantics is the meaning those synaptic links firing is interpreted as and how the body recognizes them or how external information is decoded.