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When did “consciousness” enter the Universe?

Bradskii

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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...

 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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... 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.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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"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.
 
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Akita Suggagaki

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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?
 
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durangodawood

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

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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.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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

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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...
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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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.
 
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Akita Suggagaki

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

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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.
 
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Ponderous Curmudgeon

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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.
 
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dlamberth

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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.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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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.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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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.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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FrumiousBandersnatch

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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).
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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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)
 
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durangodawood

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durangodawood

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