http://fcmconference.org/img/Cambrid...sciousness.pdf
What is consciousness anyway? Is it specifically consciousness that makes it bad for something to die? Why do people care more about animal suffeirng than human suffering? Why do americans find it sadder when a dog dies in a movie than when a foreign soldier dies?
Is a sunflower conscious when it turns its head towards the sun? Isn't that a reaction to the environment on a very basic level? IS THAT CONSCIOUSNESS? I believe it is, but it's such subtle and low-level awareness that people don't see it as such. The world exists in gradients but language is very block-like and black and white.
Do remoras feel envy? Do remoras ever look at the shark another remora is attached to and think "Dayum. That's a lucky sucker."
In answer to finding a dog in a movie dying more sad than a foreign soldier, well, I've had a pet dog die. I've never had a pet foreign soldier die. There just isn't as strong of a sympathetic relationship.
I'm suspicious of people who say they'll die for a flag but won't wear a mask for their neighbor.
Isn't that more sentience rather than consciousness? Sentience presupposes consciousness but not vice versa.Originally Posted by Hephaestus
How can you note consciousness save by sentience?
I'm suspicious of people who say they'll die for a flag but won't wear a mask for their neighbor.
Eh, well the distinguishing element of consciousness is a looped reference to the self within a self-projected model of existence. The sunflower is more like a thermostat responding to feedbacks, instead of attempting to actually record those inputs into a coherent self-image of the universe.
Die Logik ist keine Lehre, sondern ein Spiegelbild der Welt. Die Logik ist transcendental. - Wittgenstein
No, I think that's self-awareness. Consciousness (at least, according to Wikipedia) is being able to feel the outside world. It's what makes you aware of colors, sound, taste, pain... What gives each wave-length its particular color? How can art be beautiful? It's what gives each stimulus a meaning and feel.
We know that most animals aren't self-aware, the mirror test is pretty clear on that. But that doesn't they lack perpective and feeling.
But yeah, consciousness is weird. Some people say there's no such thing, that it's an emergent property of intelligent things.
I'd say it is only within a system of related concepts joining together our physical experiences that consciousness is possible, in the sense we typically mean by 'consciousness', rather than merely a response to the said experience.
Die Logik ist keine Lehre, sondern ein Spiegelbild der Welt. Die Logik ist transcendental. - Wittgenstein
I tend to think consciousness is illusory in the first place, and that animals are conscious in the same way humans are.
Consciousness is an emergent property of a slab of meat with a certain internal organization.
The components of a consciousness have been around since the big bang and will outlive consciousness far into the future, it not forever. Sometimes they come together to form a slab of meat that values its existence, but their destiny is bigger than that.
It's a damn real illusion for me, though.
But yeah, you might be right. Humans tend to think they are magical super-beings, because that's how they feel inside, but it might not be that special.
Maybe we could define consciousness as the ability to have a point-of-view?
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