When did “consciousness” enter the Universe?

[Bradskii]

I am sure you are not alone. I have had many discussions with atheists. But again, what makes "you" different form your computer other than more complex processes?

If we look at the consciousness we posess and work backwards until we reach...bacteria, then there is no bright line that we reach where we can say 'this is where consciousness starts'. It's a continuum.

But I think we'd agree that a bacteria isn't conscious in any meaningful way. And neither is a computer. But here are some of the characteristics generally agreed upon whereby we can consider something 'alive':

• responsiveness to the environment;
• growth and change;
• ability to reproduce;
• have a metabolism and breathe;
• maintain homeostasis;
• being made of cells; and.
• passing traits onto offspring

Apart from 'being made of cells' (assuming we consider cells to be naturally produced) then I'm pretty certain that we could eventually build some version of artificail intelligence that would fulfill all of those criteria. And they would initailly be no more 'conscious' than bacteria.

But look where bacteria ended up...

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

... The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind It All, Bernard Haisch.

Too much pseudoscience & speculative mysticism for my taste.

What kind of person does not talk to us, does not sit down and have a up of coffee with us? And is also in some kind of trinary communion of persons?

Frankly? An imaginary one. I wish people would leave imaginary friends to the children.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

"IF" I understand Panpsychism correctly, doesn't it imply that all things have intelligence? If that's right, it's something I'm very comfortable with as I see intelligence as an aspect of consciousness.

Not specifically. it implies universal consciousness or awareness, not necessarily intelligence.

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

If we look at the consciousness we posess and work backwards until we reach...bacteria, then there is no bright line that we reach where we can say 'this is where consciousness starts'. It's a continuum.

But I think we'd agree that a bacteria isn't conscious in any meaningful way.

That is where we diverge: "meaningful way". As you said , there is no clear place to draw that line.

So lets not draw it.

Unless we arbitrarily go with:

• responsiveness to the environment;
• growth and change;
• ability to reproduce;
• have a metabolism and breathe;
• maintain homeostasis;
• being made of cells; and.
• passing traits onto offspring

But then even bacteria does that, right?

 

[durangodawood]

That is where we diverge: "meaningful way". As you said , there is no clear place to draw that line.

So lets not draw it.

Unless we arbitrarily go with:

• responsiveness to the environment;
• growth and change;
• ability to reproduce;
• have a metabolism and breathe;
• maintain homeostasis;
• being made of cells; and.
• passing traits onto offspring

But then even bacteria does that, right?

Sure, its arbitrary if you think our categories of "life" and "not-life" are arbitrary.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

One or two members commented a while back that to discuss the first appearance of consciouness we had first of all to define it. The definition you are using there makes, IMO, it so general as to be meaningless. You are according a degree of consciouness to anything which reacts to its environment - which is pretty much everything. So naturally, with that definition, consciousness is present from the beginning. I don't see how that view really informs the conversation in any useful way.

Exactly; a major problem with Goffian panpsychism is that we lose the core meaning of the very thing we're trying to explain - something that we first described because seemed to be special to us (and, perhaps, a few other animals). We also lose the potential for a functional explanation, e.g. selective advantage, and have to accept it as brute fact - which is a last resort option that denies the possibility of an explanation.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

That is where we diverge: "meaningful way". As you said , there is no clear place to draw that line.

So lets not draw it.

Unless we arbitrarily go with:

• responsiveness to the environment;
• growth and change;
• ability to reproduce;
• have a metabolism and breathe;
• maintain homeostasis;
• being made of cells; and.
• passing traits onto offspring

But then even bacteria does that, right?

from the divisions of the electromagnetic spectrum to the seven ages of man, we divide and categorise continua because it's useful.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

You cannot open the brain and point to consciousness or even memory. You can only detect brain waves, electrical activity. Do you want to call that consciousness? How is it different from my computer?

You can't point to them because they're conceptual abstractions; you also can't point to geometry, thermodynamics, or stickiness.

The evidence suggests that consciousness is one of the things the brain does; you can't point to it because it's a process.

E.T.A. Scooped by Bradskii...

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Sorry about the minor book sale aspect embedded in this article. I still found it an interesting read that might relate to some of the discussions in this thread.

The Most Amazing Things About Animal Consciousness

He said a lot that I can broadly agree with, but raises a major red flag, "animal consciousness, like human consciousness, involves the collapse of wave function." A surprising certainty when even physicists working on the fundamentals of quantum physics don't know whether it occurs at all, let alone whether it has anything to do with consciousness...

There are a variety of hypotheses claiming a relation between consciousness and quantum effects, best summed up as consciousness is weird and we don't understand it, quantum mechanics is weird and we don't understand it, so consciousness must depend on quantum mechanics. None of them remotely approaches an explanation of anything.

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

There are a variety of hypotheses claiming a relation between consciousness and quantum effects, best summed up as consciousness is weird and we don't understand it, quantum mechanics is weird and we don't understand it, so consciousness must depend on quantum mechanics. None of them remotely approaches an explanation of anything.

Yes, but everything depends on quantum mechanics. It is the foundation of our existence...deeper than chemistry.

 

[dlamberth]

But I think we'd agree that a bacteria isn't conscious in any meaningful way. And neither is a computer. But here are some of the characteristics generally agreed upon whereby we can consider something 'alive':

• responsiveness to the environment;
• growth and change;
• ability to reproduce;
• have a metabolism and breathe;
• maintain homeostasis;
• being made of cells; and.
• passing traits onto offspring

Rather than focusing down on the individual form for what is alive, I tend to step back and take an over view approach such that its the creative life force of Life itSelf which is where I go when considering Life. And that has a way of bringing in most everything into the fold of Life in a non-separated way of individualism. And Consciousness as I experience it is an aspect of that Life Force. So the bacteria, being apart of Life, has some level of consciousness and at the same time actually fulfills all of your listed requirements.

 

[Ponderous Curmudgeon]

Yes, but everything depends on quantum mechanics. It is the foundation of our existence...deeper than chemistry.

But that doesn't mean that Quantum Mechanics is necessary to explain everything. QM is not necessary at the macro scale.

 

[dlamberth]

Not specifically. it implies universal consciousness or awareness, not necessarily intelligence.

I'm not sure how we can have a "universal consciousness or awareness" and not have intelligence embedded within it.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I’m not gonna deny that my analogy wasn’t great, but I was only aiming at a section of the analogy, just the part that would make the person who asked the question roll their eyes at the answer and be like “Oh come on that’s not what I was asking.” That’s the gut reaction I get when a person calls squishy matter and a series of synapses the same exact thing as bone chilling fear that I’m feeling as someone chases me with a knife.

There is an explanatory gap when someone tries to say that physical/chemical mechanisms become alive and have experiential qualities, however this explanatory gap is not present when you are explaining physical sequences. A detailed explanation of physical mechanisms does makes sense, and it makes sense at every single turn. But the only aspect of the physical mechanism’s relation to mental phenomena that ‘Makes sense’ is the ‘When’ part. We can understand pointing to a certain stage of development and saying “That’s when it happens”, but what exactly it is, and how it happens is a gapping hole of understanding.

We know, more than we know anything, that we are conscious. So consciousness is therefore an undeniable aspect of reality. When we know that something undeniably exists in reality, and when physical descriptions runs into explanatory gaps when trying to explain them then there is either more to reality than just the physical, or we just don’t know enough about reality yet. But my problem with it being the latter is that I can’t even make sense out of what a coherent explanation would even look like! Physical mechanisms at some point being experientially alive, what does that even mean from a cause & effect standpoint where you’re analyzing each sequence? So IMO we have the meshing together of two different fabrics of ultimate reality. They correlate with each other very much so, but if the scientific method isn’t able to lead us to “Aha that cause & effect sequence makes total sense” then a physical cause & effect platform isn’t enough to explain everything in reality. I can’t see how adding 100 billion more physical cause & effect sequences to the process would somehow create a moment of “Ok now it makes sense that it’s alive.” Or a trillion, or 100 trillion. That is a reply that I see a lot, that just adding more physical complexities is supposed to give it explanatory power.

It's not just a question of adding complexity. We already know that the brain is not just complex; there is a large number of brain areas that are functionally specific and connected together in specific ways. We also know that specific damage to these areas or their inter-connections causes specific deficits in consciousness, affect, and sense of self. We also have tentative models for how the supporting framework for high-level consciousness functions, from internal and external senses to hind-brain structures to mid-brain structures and on to the cortex. These models are broadly based on the evolutionary sequence that produced the mammalian brain.

Given what we know now, and the advances in exploratory techinques in recent years, it is not unreasonable to suggest that we may eventually be able to identify all the functional requirements (i.e. processes and information inputs) and relations necessary to result in subjective experience. Whether we will be able to say precisely how they do so is a moot point, but we should have a better understanding of it than we do now. Ultimately, it may be that we'll only be able to say that if you connect these processes together in this way and feed it this kind of information, the system will have subjective experience.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I'm not sure how we can have a "universal consciousness or awareness" and not have intelligence embedded within it.

I'm sceptical of 'universal consciousness or awareness', but I can conceive of conscious awareness without intelligence.

What is your understanding of what intelligence means?

Most definitions are along the line of problem-solving ability, or cognition (thought) more generally. It seems to me that awareness is possible without thinking about what you're aware of - for us humans it's tricky because whenever we stop focusing on something our Default Mode Network clicks in and our minds start wandering, e.g. daydreaming. But it is said to be possible to achieve simple awareness through meditation, and I've experienced what seemed like awareness without explicit thought when 'in the zone' playing sport (squash); in that situation, mind & body integrate so well that any conscious thought seems unnecessary until you 'snap out of it' at some point and realise what has happened.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I thought Deepak Chopra was either an aromatic herb, or a 1960s Bollywood actor. How little I know!

Check out the New-Age BS Generator. It's as close to Chopra as makes no difference, but it won't try to empty your wallet.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Yes, but everything depends on quantum mechanics. It is the foundation of our existence...deeper than chemistry.

Yes, of course; but what they're talking about is not the everyday pseudo-classical physics that emerges from quantum mechanics, but macroscale quantum effects, such as entanglement or superposition.

There are some quantum effects that macroscale biology makes use of, but as far as I'm aware, it works at an intermediate (molecular) scale, and involves functional optimizations. Examples would be the optimization of electron transfer during photosynthesis, the magnetic sensitivity of the molecules involved in the navigation of birds, and (it has been suggested) the ability of individual olfactory receptors to distinguish many different-shaped molecules.

The QM-consciousness ideas of Penrose & Hammerof, or Stapp, suggest QM effects can coordinate activity across the whole brain (and perhaps beyond).

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Rather than focusing down on the individual form for what is alive, I tend to step back and take an over view approach such that its the creative life force of Life itSelf which is where I go when considering Life. And that has a way of bringing in most everything into the fold of Life in a non-separated way of individualism. And Consciousness as I experience it is an aspect of that Life Force. So the bacteria, being apart of Life, has some level of consciousness and at the same time actually fulfills all of your listed requirements.

There is no 'life force' or 'Life Force', unless you mean that as a metaphor, in which case your extensions of it are nonsensical.

Life is essentially a complex form of persistent oxidation/reduction (redox) chemistry, similar in principle to fire (combustion), but at much lower temperatures.

According to Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi: “Life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.” (American Society for Microbiology)

 

[durangodawood]

Check out the New-Age BS Generator. It's as close to Chopra as makes no difference, but it won't try to empty your wallet.

Ahaha. Except I did get this gem which I probably should take seriously:

This life is nothing short of an unveiling vector of psychic freedom.

 

[durangodawood]

There is no 'life force' or 'Life Force', unless you mean that as a metaphor, in which case your extensions of it are nonsensical.

Life is essentially a complex form of persistent oxidation/reduction (redox) chemistry, similar in principle to fire (combustion), but at much lower temperatures.

According to Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi: “Life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.” (American Society for Microbiology)

A little (no a lot) too reductionist for my taste.