When did “consciousness” enter the Universe?

[coffee4u]

Didn't the Christian God have consciousness pre-Creation?

Yes, that is why I said God was always there.

 

[dlamberth]

That's a bit too much peace and love and crystals and dream catchers for me.

There are reasons why some things smell bad and some good. There are reasons why a meadow full of flowers is more appealing that stunted trees on a dry plain. There's a reason why mothers love their children and we all like puppies, raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.

And knowing why we love things doesn't detract from the fact that we do. Here's my avatar explaining that:

As Human Beings it's the doing and what we're doing that contributors to our humanness. So, I someone like myself doesn't give a rip for why those Sweetpea's my wife planted smell so wonderful. But boy...I sure do enjoy them when working around them in the garden. You brought up Love. Knowledge for why we do stuff like Love isn't a bad thing. But the why isn't Love. The why is only a mental concept of Love that isn't real until that moment that it's actually activated in a persons Heart. Then it becomes real. And sometimes even makes us crazy. I have a hard time with crystals and dream catchers and that kind of stuff myself. I'm not a bit fan of New Age stuff. But I am interested in that you saw it as that.

 

[dlamberth]

Yes, that is why I said God was always there.

Can you describe the consciousness of God pre-Creation? I know you'd have to use your imagination a bit...well maybe a lot.

I envision the Christian pre-Creation God as pure consciousness with nothing to be conscious of. No Universe, no body, no doing anything to be conscious of. God just sitting there being pure consciousness.

 

[Bradskii]

As Human Beings it's the doing and what we're doing that contributors to our humanness. So, I someone like myself doesn't give a rip for why those Sweetpea's my wife planted smell so wonderful. But boy...I sure do enjoy them when working around them in the garden. You brought up Love. Knowledge for why we do stuff like Love isn't a bad thing. But the why isn't Love. The why is only a mental concept of Love that isn't real until that moment that it's actually activated in a persons Heart. Then it becomes real. And sometimes even makes us crazy. I have a hard time with crystals and dream catchers and that kind of stuff myself. I'm not a bit fan of New Age stuff. But I am interested in that you saw it as that.

Again, I don't want to sound as if I'm belittling the experiences that we have. But when my few week old grandaughter smiles and I get that tightness in my throat and I feel overwhelmingly protective then I know from a specifically materialistic viewpoint why, and how, that is happening. There are automatic and instinctive feelings running riot and there are synapses firing and chemicals being released and all sorts of processes kicking in that are inbuilt following millions of years of evolution. But I don't think on that when I hold her. And it doesn't make it any less wonderful.

 

[dlamberth]

Again, I don't want to sound as if I'm belittling the experiences that we have. But when my few week old grandaughter smiles and I get that tightness in my throat and I feel overwhelmingly protective then I know from a specifically materialistic viewpoint why, and how, that is happening. There are automatic and instinctive feelings running riot and there are synapses firing and chemicals being released and all sorts of processes kicking in that are inbuilt following millions of years of evolution. But I don't think on that when I hold her. And it doesn't make it any less wonderful.

When exploring Love, I have to hand it to the poet and songster for the why. Grandchildren are the best. From your descriptions I can see you loving her dearly!

 

[coffee4u]

Can you describe the consciousness of God pre-Creation? I know you'd have to use your imagination a bit...well maybe a lot.

I envision the Christian pre-Creation God as pure consciousness with nothing to be conscious of. No Universe, no body, no doing anything to be conscious of. God just sitting there being pure consciousness.

God is spirit, but since God is also said to be omnipresence which means be present everywhere at the same time then perhaps how he 'looks' is the wrong question.
Then the Bible says angels can change form and God appeared to mankind in a few different ways, from a fire to a hand writing on the wall and a pillar of smoke. So I assume God can look anyway he likes.

I would also assume his attributes to be the same as now since it says he in unchanging.

Perhaps the universe is actually God wrapped around us and mankind only thinks its a universe. It does say God upholds it all.
Colossians 1:17
He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

 

[Vap841]

Thought I'd try this out to see where it went.
I have some questions that I’m wondering how you all might answer.

The basic question I'm asking is "When did “consciousness” enter the Universe?"

Was it at the moment of the Big Bang?
Did consciousness exist before the Big Bang?
Did consciousness evolve into existence in parallel with the first creatures here on Earth?
Does the Universe itself have a consciousness that exist because the Universe exists?
What does science say about when consciousness entered the Universe?
The religious? What would you say?
The spiritual minded folks? Same question.
Any other ideas?

Science has nothing at all to say about consciousness. Similar to a stone mason having nothing to say about the sizing requirements of an HVAC installation.

 

[Bradskii]

Science has nothing at all to say about consciousness. Similar to a stone mason having nothing to say about the sizing requirements of an HVAC installation.

I could have sworn that neuroscience was a science. The clue is in the name I guess.

 

[durangodawood]

...It took a whole different paradigm of what consciousness is that opened me up to this idea.....

This is clearly a problem when trying to open a discussion on the topic. Most people discuss in terms of old paradigm, but youre talking in terms of a new one - one that you barely have the words to explain.

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

I could have sworn that neuroscience was a science. The clue is in the name I guess.

Science of how the brain works, not what consciousness is.

 

[durangodawood]

Science of how the brain works, not what consciousness is.

How do you know those are different?

 

[Phred]

God is spirit, but since God is also said to be omnipresence which means be present everywhere at the same time then perhaps how he 'looks' is the wrong question.
Then the Bible says angels can change form and God appeared to mankind in a few different ways, from a fire to a hand writing on the wall and a pillar of smoke. So I assume God can look anyway he likes.

I would also assume his attributes to be the same as now since it says he in unchanging.

Perhaps the universe is actually God wrapped around us and mankind only thinks its a universe. It does say God upholds it all.
Colossians 1:17
He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

You prefer consciousness popping into existence at some arbitrary point of development? An emergent property of matter?

It makes sense to me that it's an emergent property of brain functioning, but I wouldn't say it 'popped' into existence; rather, it co-evolved as a capacity with the ability to create internal maps of the body and the environment and locate/orient the self-mapping in the environmental map. This would provide a simple sense of self in the world, useful for navigation, hunting and avoiding predators.

The body map would probably come first and feedback from the organs and senses would provide what Damasio calls 'primordial feelings' and the foundation of a sense of self. My guess is that the feeling of subjective awareness, that there is 'something it is like' to be some creature, would emerge as the internal body map and its associate processing became more complex and sophisticated. The initial mappings are in the mid-brain, and in vertebrates, they project up to mapping in the cortex where more complex associations occur, so it's likely that richness of conscious experience increases with increasing sophistication of the cortex.

In humans, it's possible to test when sensory signals reach the threshold of reported conscious awareness and examine brain activity under and over that threshold. Below the threshold, the patterns of neural activity are restricted to the relevant sensory processing areas; above the threshold, they trigger widespread cortical activity across the brain, which 'reverberates' for a short period before dying away. This suggests that the cortex is critical to human-level conscious awareness, so it may be that subjective awareness, as we think of it, began to develop as the cortex evolved.

The proposed correlation between the richness of conscious experience and the complexity and sophistication of the brain, particularly the cortex, is mirrored in the animal kingdom, as far as we can tell from studying animal behaviour.

That also evades explanation and makes no testable predictions, has no supporting evidence, raises more questions than it supposedly answers.

I disagree; I've already given some of the supporting evidence. Admittedly, the nature of subjective experience means we can only test the correlates of consciousness and try to trace the structures associated with various aspects of it. But considerable progress has been made in clarifying the internal maps and images that contribute to it, and how damage or interference in specific map & image processing areas cause specific changes in consciousness and awareness.

Creatures that do not have a degree of integrated information processing capability, e.g. a brain & nervous system, do not show signs of consciousness (i.e. the behavioural correlates). This makes sense in evolutionary terms - a brain is a resource intensive organ, and maintaining such a load is only justifiable if there is an existential need for the flexible behaviour it can provide.

I think of it as a continuum of consciousness. So even subatomic particles are a manifestation of minimal consciousness sharing in the unity of being.

It seems to me that any coherent theory of consciousness requires information processing, involving philosophical intentionality, i.e. aboutness or representation. Awareness is about something, you are aware of things, which generally means some level of sensory perception, internal and/or external.

Fundamental particles are currently described as excitations in their respective quantum fields, they're fully described FAPP by their wavefunction. I don't know what it could even mean for a subatomic particle to be conscious or aware... is it a property of a quantum field? is it an independent field? why haven't we detected it? Is an atom more conscious than its particles? do their consciousnesses combine together or remain separate? Why does the consciousness we're familiar with seem to be only associated with complex information-processing brains? and so-on. Too many questions...

I can give you a couple of book references for some fairly recent work on the neuroscience of consciousness if you'd like to fill out the skeleton I provided above.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I'm pretty certain that she's real. If she was actually a figment of my imagination, how come she just told me she wanted the bedroom repainted?

Ah. Bad luck, old boy...

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

... I have issues with those who insist only scientific explanations for things that we experience as Human Beings.

Science can only explain how the physical correlates of subjective experience behave, it's inevitably indirect. But we make approximations to that kind of thing all the time in everyday contexts: "This will make you happy, that will make you sad, this will hurt, that will taste bitter, this will taste nice, that will look red..." We can only communicate our subjective experience through metaphor and simile - appeals to common physical experience, hoping they reflect a common subjective experience - and, for the most part, they seem to.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

It's your memories. If you had my memories you'd be me. It really is that simple.

And memories are just a form of feed back loop. I believe that some creatures live entirely in the present. With no memory of what has occured and no forethough as to what will occur. So I'm not sure that they are self-conscious. But the evolutionary process gave us a means to store information. So we remember what just happened - to us as an individual. And we could project a short time in the future to consider what will happen to us - as an individual.

And that is an ability we can see graduated throughout life in all it's manifestations. If something has a memory then it can be trained to a certain extent. So an ant isn't going to remember what happened a second or to ago. Maybe a goldfish can. A rat certainly can. And an ape can likely remember what happened a few weeks ago. And we can remember incidents from decades ago.

So from that we can make a fairly educated assumption that it's an evolved characteristic. And we can examine the brains of ants, godfish, rats and apes to see what each has that enables this increased ability and how it evolved.

There is a form of memory that seems to be common to multicellular life (and perhaps some single-cell life?), and that is habituation - tending to respond less to a repeated stimulus over time, then recovering the response after a set absence of stimulation.

This can be due to the simple exhaustion of resources for the response, with a necessary time for recovery, but in more sophisticated cases, there can also be a dishabituating stimulus that immediately restores the habituated response, and which follows the same pattern - the dishabituating stimulus itself will habituate. These simple behaviours can produce what is effectively learning, and in combination can produce some quite complex behaviours.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Self-consciousness is a Human evolved capability. But an animal being aware of things around them, or aware of the predictor slinking near by, or what to eat, or that itch on the back flank are all born of consciousnesses. Maybe not self-consciousness, but consciousness still

Quite a few animals show clear signs of self-awareness; the mirror & spot test is one way to show it - you put a clear mark on the animal where they can only see it in a mirror, then let them see themselves in a mirror. If they then try to look at or touch the mark on themselves, it's a pretty solid indication that they realise the reflection is of themselves, rather than just another animal. Of course, it's only applicable to creatures that are physically capable of that kind of response...

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Why "self awareness"? What about environmental awareness alone?

The problem is in distinguishing between simple tropisms (e.g. bacteria, or plants facing the light) and having conscious awareness, e.g. involving some kind of internal model of the environment. Otherwise, you could claim that a thermostat was conscious (which some philosophers, bless 'em, actually do...)

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

I can give you a couple of book references for some fairly recent work on the neuroscience of consciousness if you'd like to fill out the skeleton I provided above.

No thanks, I am currently trying to get back into Koine Greek. It is taking all my spare time.
Are you a materialist? James H. Austin of Zen and the Brain seems to be, though also Buddhist. he gets into the details of the mapping you spoke of. I have read a lot of him when I was interested. Knowing about neuroscience is helpful when coping with thoughts, emotions and the body. But it doesn't help much when talking about philosophy of mind.

I guess I am more of a panpsychist. I always shave been. That kind of implies the Non-dualism mentioned above. Not exactly orthodox but I like it.

"Many modern thinkers have come to embrace Whitehead and panpsychism to varying degrees, including Bohm, whose Wholeness and the Implicate Order, his magnum opus on modern physics and the nature of reality, refers to Whitehead as an inspiration."
Electrons May Very Well Be Conscious - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

 

[dlamberth]

Science can only explain how the physical correlates of subjective experience behave, it's inevitably indirect. But we make approximations to that kind of thing all the time in everyday contexts: "This will make you happy, that will make you sad, this will hurt, that will taste bitter, this will taste nice, that will look red..." We can only communicate our subjective experience through metaphor and simile - appeals to common physical experience, hoping they reflect a common subjective experience - and, for the most part, they seem to.

Would I be correct in that science approaches the physical aspect more like a mechanical mechanism?