Consciousness

[yougene]

But how can self-awareness not be awareness. If not for the self, could there be awareness. We often speak of group awareness, but is this really a real thing? Is it not just a collective of individual conciousnesses? I think therefore I am, but without the I, how can there be an am?

Self-Awareness is awareness of the self. Meaning self is an object that arises in awareness. Anything you can be aware of is not awareness itself.

A conception of I may or may not arise, but being can still be present.

 

[burn out]

i was going to comment but then i read yougene's posts and he already expressed every thing i had wanted to get across already and probably more clearly too.

too yougene, what do you think happens to human's consciousness after the physical body dies?

 

[yougene]

I really have no idea. Part of who you are maybe moves on maybe it doesn't. I think something of us does get passed on, but nothing like we usually conceive it to me.

Everpresent awareness remains everpresent.

 

[mulberryman]

Perhaps our conciousness becomes exponentially slower in the very instant of our death, that is we live on in infinity within less than a microsecond.

 

[Xorkoth]

My belief is that "we" live on eternally, timelessly, as part of tyhe collective whole of experience, but as that collective whole, not as an individual identity.

 

[swilow]

Perhaps our conciousness becomes exponentially slower in the very instant of our death, that is we live on in infinity within less than a microsecond.

Thats a very interesteing concept mulberryman...

 

[mulberryman]

thanks, an infinite life in a dream state that would depend on our unconcious mind, if one is at peace, it would likely be pleasant, while leading a troubled life would likely equate an infinite nightmare, we could create the notion of such ideas as heaven and hell for ourselves within our own brains.

 

[fastandbulbous]

Help. Cerebral meltdown. Shutting down.

We'll collect up the puddle of your brain & put it in the 'fridge. When you want, you can get it back, although I can't guarentee it will not be in the shape of a comical jelly mould!

 

[swilow]

^Either way I'm sure it'll be more functional then it is now

 

[psood0nym]

thanks, an infinite life in a dream state that would depend on our unconcious mind, if one is at peace, it would likely be pleasant, while leading a troubled life would likely equate an infinite nightmare, we could create the notion of such ideas as heaven and hell for ourselves within our own brains.

It's an interesting idea, but it's unlikely for a number of reasons. One of the most interesting is the following: We know subjective "dream time" is about the same as subjective waking time. One way this is determined is by having a lucid dreamer estimate certain time durations, the start and end of which is signaled by eye movement signals, during the time when an EEG confirms they are dreaming. The perception that dreamers sometimes have of living a subjective day/week/whatever within a night of dreaming is likely a rationalization they make subconsciously after waking to give the disparate events of dreams the continuity of waking experience. It may also be possible to have the blunt sense of significant amounts of time having past imported to a dream irrespective of the actual amount of content experienced by superimposing past feelings of long durations over montage-like dream content, though this is still far short of a subjective eternity.

 

[specialspack]

SpecialSpack, great post. I believe you are correct situating consciousness within a historical framework.

However, I think the idea will go beyond simply being able to grasp the concept of consciousness (through a historical perspective), if one situates consciousness as a biological process emergent as a result of evolution. Evolutionary history is something that can be scientifically understood. Not only the history but also the future.

In order to understand the true nature of consciousness (and not just our historical perception of), there must be an understanding of how it emerged. I believe consciousness emerged out of simple pattern recognition processes. It seems to work theoretically (under artificial neural network models) as well as experentially (especially on psychedelics it seems intuitive!). As these processes developed, the fine grained nature of consciouness emerged. Apples started tasting like apples and oranges started tasting like oranges (based on a near infinitude of pattern repetition).

I was sure I posted a reply to this ages ago, but it seems to have been excised by whatever daemons crawl the bluelight servers. Or maybe I just forgot to click submit.

Anyhugh... firstly, you are understating my point. I wasn't talking about historical perceptions of consciosness, I was talking directly about it. It's not that "perceptions" of consciousness have changed, literally consciousness itself has changed over time.

Consciousness is not a biological process, because I don't believe (as previously stated) that correct biology is a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. What is necessary is not just the biological functionality, but the presence of Others, and being-with them. Would you describe literature, or theatre, or music as a biological process? Consciousness must encompass these activities as much as it must the elements of analytic thinking.

We could settle this quite nicely by raising a few human babies from birth, to adulthood, in total isolation. My guess is that they would not be "conscious" as we understand it. I imagine they would have some kind of ultra-autism, as they would have no concept of Other. Yes, of course it would be highly unethical!

I would recommend "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser", a film by Werner Herzog for those interested in this subject.

 

[Xorkoth]

We could settle this quite nicely by raising a few human babies from birth, to adulthood, in total isolation. My guess is that they would not be "conscious" as we understand it. I imagine they would have some kind of ultra-autism, as they would have no concept of Other. Yes, of course it would be highly unethical!

But autistic people are still fully conscious. They just are totally unable to do anything socially, which extends to a great many of a typical person's skills.

I think the same would be true for a child raised in total isolation. They would be conscious with as much potential as the rest of us, but their mode of consciousness would undoubtedly be fundamentally different, without language to structure their thoughts. I'm sure they'd be utterly unable to function in the world. But they would have some form of consciousness, I speculate.

 

[B9]

I speculate.

I think everyone who posted was speculating , except me of course

 

[mulberryman]

I would go on to speculate than autistic person's thoughts would likely be internalized greatly. If one thinks therefore one is, then they would be thinking more (and thus interacting less), so they would not only have a conciousness, but perhaps ae even more pronounced one. Perhaps it is when our conciousness increases as our thoughts internalize and decreases as we socialize. Perhaps we are actually more concious when we dream and the "end" of our conciousness is the ultimate level of conciousness we can attain.

 

[specialspack]

But autistic people are still fully conscious. They just are totally unable to do anything socially, which extends to a great many of a typical person's skills

Yes, I don't mean to say that autistics are not "conscious" - I was thinking of something much more extreme, akin to catalepsy.

I think the same would be true for a child raised in total isolation. They would be conscious with as much potential as the rest of us, but their mode of consciousness would undoubtedly be fundamentally different, without language to structure their thoughts. I'm sure they'd be utterly unable to function in the world. But they would have some form of consciousness, I speculate.

Perhaps conscious like an animal? Although this is really getting into definitional arguments about what "consciousness" means. I think Dondante is too generous in his formulation in the first post, by extending it to higher mammals. Any attempt to extend the term is tricky, because we have no rules to try to objectively define what consciousness is, and we're left with empty speculation about the inner lives of higher mammals and where one would draw the line.

Which is why I prefer to think of "consciousness" as literally "the type of consciousness that humans have" because we have no experience of any other.

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

[Dondante]

I think Dondante is too generous in his formulation in the first post, by extending it to higher mammals.

Honestly, for what I meant to address in this thread, my definition in the original post was too narrow. I’m trying to get at awareness, pure and simple; thoughts and feelings are by no means required. Experience could entail as little as a flash … a blip on the radar, not necessarily tied to memory encoding device or entailing any sense of continuity.

In an earlier post I said:

Isn’t it possible that the human brain is just an extremely complex arrangement that allows for a continuity of consciousness? Must consciousness/experience entail continuity?

Instinct and the memory are products of evolution. If consciousness/experience were to occur apart from any complex sensory manifold with memory, instincts, etc, it would just be a flash of experience. This is difficult to grasp because of our preconceptions of what consciousness entails, but what if the most simplistic of systems (e.g. Chalmer’s thermostat) gave rise to a flash of experience.

Think about the possibility that consciousness ranges from our enormously rich perceptual manifold to more and more simplistic experiences as you move down to the level of a mouse, a lizard, a slug, a single neuron, a single cell, and right on down to elementary particles.

Maybe it's best to view consciousness as a spandrel, (a non adaptive trait that goes hand in hand with an adaptive one) something that came along with the evolution of the "psychological mind" as Dondante calls it. This is more or less what Dennett proposes - the subjective, phenomenal mind is a complex, constant redrafting of a narrative which glues all the psychological subsystems together. It does not have to be epihenomal - without the phenomenal mind perhaps the whole system of advanced human cognition would fall apart. This seems much more likely to be the case than a pure epiphenomena which we can conceive of doing without (the zombie argument).

I still think Dennett is trying to get something from nothing with that argument. The phenomenal mind is so radically different from the psychological. Panexperientialism is more intuitive to me than imagining that the psychological mind is prerequisite and the phenomenal jumped in at some arbitrary point in time to function as glue. That implies that there was a point where the psychological mind became sufficiently complex to require the phenomenal. Before this all animals were on autopilot … no experience whatsoever. The appearance of consciousness is not like that of the wing or the feather in the course of evolutionary history. The latter would be a problem of semantics. How do you define wing? But for the fact of EXPERIENCE, it's either there or it's not! How can you rationalize a sudden emergence from NOTHING?

On the other hand, what constitutes a psychological mind? Is it as simple as neural wiring that directs response to environmental stimuli; governing mechanics of behavior systems, of physical systems? This could be taken far below the threshold of what we normally imagine to constitute a psychological mind.

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

What Chalmers says is much more generous:

“Either there is something that it is like to be a mouse or there is not, and it is not up to us to define the mouse’s experience into or out of existence. To be sure, there is probably a continuum of conscious experience from the very faint to the very rich; but if something has conscious experience, however faint, we cannot stipulate it away.”

… I prefer to think of "consciousness" as literally "the type of consciousness that humans have" because we have no experience of any other.

There are a few things I was trying to address in this thread …

Specifically, when did the phenomenon of experience arise? Is it ubiquitous? Has it always existed? Could it be as Chalmer’s proposed, experience, information from the inside; physics, information from the outside?

Thanks for all the replies!!!

 

[ronald_stark]

I wonder about the idea of bicameralism as put forth by Julian Jaynes in his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". I read this book several years back and could not help but think of it as I read through this thread. A brief description copied from http://deoxy.org/ has been pasted-in below then a excerpt from the book follows:

In this book, Jaynes theorizes that ancient consciousness was radically different from modern consciousness. He suggests that ancient human beings had no sense of an interior, directing self. Rather, they accepted commands from what appeared to them to be an externalized agency, which they obeyed blindly, without question.
This externalized self was a consequence of the split between the two halves of the brain. Jaynes suggests that the left and right brains were not integrated—"unicameral"—they way they are today. Rather, the ancient brain was "bicameral," with the two brains working essentially independently of each other. The left half of the brain, the logical, language-using half, generated ideas and commands, which the right brain then obeyed. These commands were subjectively perceived by the right brain as coming from "outside"—as if a god was speaking.

Jaynes adduces evidence for this astonishing hypothesis from several sources. One is the "voices" heard by schizophrenic patients, which Jaynes interprets as a throwback to the bicameral mind of ancient times. Another is evidence from neurosurgery, where patients hear "voices" upon having their brains electrically stimulated. Another is the polytheistic gods of ancient civilizations, which spoke directly and intimately to individuals:

"Who then were these gods who pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips? They were voices whose speech and directions could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients...The gods were organizations of the central nervous system"(73-4).

Jaynes suggests that each person had his own individual "god", which always told them what to do. The theory further accounts for why the gods were so naturalistic and anthropomorphic, rather than supernatural and otherworldly.

Where did the gods go, then? Jaynes proposes that a series of unprecedented environmental stresses in the second millennium B.C. forced the two halves of the brain to merge into unicamerality. (This was a cultural, rather than a biological, transformation, Jaynes notes.) The stresses might have included natural disasters (the story of the Flood comes to mind), population growth, forced migrations, warfare, trade, and the development of writing. A common denominator among all these is the introduction of complexity and difference, things the bicameral mind deals with only with difficulty. Jaynes suggests, among other things, that traders in contact with other cultures might have been forced to develop a "protosubjective consciousness" to cope with the gods of unfamiliar people.

Jaynes suggests that the unprecedented stresses of the 2nd millennium B.C. forced the individual into isolation, within which a sense of I-ness appeared to fill the void left by the inadequacy of the god. This hypothesis posits a relatively homogeneous and stress-free existence prior to the development of consciousness. In short, Jaynes must posit that there really was an Eden, from which humanity Fell.

To establish the gods' disappearance, Jaynes cites a number of illustrations and cuneiform tablets dating from Sumerian times. He shows a stone-carven image of the King of Assyria kneeling in supplication before an empty throne, from which his god is conspicuously absent. The accompanying cuneiform script reads, "One who has no god, as he walks along the street,/ Headache envelopes him like a garment." Another tablet reads,

My god has forsaken me and disappeared,
My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance.

The good angel who walked beside me has departed.

Jaynes interprets this as evidence of a new subjectivity in Mesopotamia. The bicameral mind has begun to collapse into the modern unicameral mind of the self-willed, self-aware "I", and as a consequence the gods no longer speak to people, as they did in the days of old (223).

These lamentations sound remarkably like the nam-shubs mentioned in Snow Crash.

The nam-shubs also mourn something precious, and speak of confusion and loss. It is not at all hard to guess that the loss of bicameral tranquility may have been accompanied by unprecedented linguistic disruption (irrespective of any causal relationship between the two.) The Tower of Babel story—which the nam-shubs strongly resemble—may have happened at a time when bicamerality was breaking down.

Be this historical truth or not (and the thesis has not been widely accepted), Jaynes has fashioned a brilliant myth of human origins. Like the authors of Snow Crash and Macroscope, Jaynes reaches far back into the past for an authentic story of a Fall from wholeness. And like them, he reaches specifically for Mesopotamian myth.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
At the heart of this book is the revolutionary idea that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but is a learned process brought into being out of an earlier hallucinatory mentality by cataclysm and catastrophe only 3000 years ago and still developing. The implications of this new scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion - and indeed, our future. In the words of one reviewer, it is "a humbling text, the kind that reminds most of us who make our livings through thinking, how much thinking there is left to do."

* * *
Presents a theory of the bicameral mind which holds that ancient peoples could not "think" as we do today and were therefore "unconscious," a result of the domination of the right hemisphere; only catastrophe forced mankind to "learn" consciousness, a product of human history and culture and one that issues from the brain's left hemisphere. Three forms of human awareness, the bicameral or god-run man; the modern or problem-solving man; and contemporary forms of throwbacks to bicamerality (e.g., religious frenzy, hypnotism, and schizophrenia) are examined in terms of the physiology of the brain and how it applies to human psychology, culture, and history.

* * *
"O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why?"

- excerpt from the introduction to "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

 

[specialspack]

Honestly, for what I meant to address in this thread, my definition in the original post was too narrow. I’m trying to get at awareness, pure and simple; thoughts and feelings are by no means required. Experience could entail as little as a flash … a blip on the radar, not necessarily tied to memory encoding device or entailing any sense of continuity.

In an earlier post I said:

Isn’t it possible that the human brain is just an extremely complex arrangement that allows for a continuity of consciousness? Must consciousness/experience entail continuity?

Instinct and the memory are products of evolution. If consciousness/experience were to occur apart from any complex sensory manifold with memory, instincts, etc, it would just be a flash of experience. This is difficult to grasp because of our preconceptions of what consciousness entails, but what if the most simplistic of systems (e.g. Chalmer’s thermostat) gave rise to a flash of experience.

Think about the possibility that consciousness ranges from our enormously rich perceptual manifold to more and more simplistic experiences as you move down to the level of a mouse, a lizard, a slug, a single neuron, a single cell, and right on down to elementary particles.

I think I'm in broad agreement with you here, in that I think there probably is something-that-it-is-like-to-be a mouse, insect, and possibly even cells and down. But I think to call such experience of Being "consciousness" muddies the waters. Consciousness, both in lay discussion and among philosophers and neuroscientists implies more than simple experience... a quick browse of definitions of "consciousness" within technical encyclopedias will tell you so.

I still think Dennett is trying to get something from nothing with that argument. The phenomenal mind is so radically different from the psychological. Panexperientialism is more intuitive to me than imagining that the psychological mind is prerequisite and the phenomenal jumped in at some arbitrary point in time to function as glue. That implies that there was a point where the psychological mind became sufficiently complex to require the phenomenal. Before this all animals were on autopilot … no experience whatsoever. The appearance of consciousness is not like that of the wing or the feather in the course of evolutionary history. The latter would be a problem of semantics. How do you define wing? But for the fact of EXPERIENCE, it's either there or it's not! How can you rationalize a sudden emergence from NOTHING?

The whole point about consciousness as a spandrel is that it CAN'T simply jump in once the psychological mind is there - the two evolve together, in slow steps, hand in hand. One is not the prequisite for the the other - gotta think dialectically!

I'm not sure I understand your last bit about the wing... but I hope you understand I'm not trying to rationalise emergence from nothing (see previous posts!)

On the other hand, what constitutes a psychological mind? Is it as simple as neural wiring that directs response to environmental stimuli; governing mechanics of behavior systems, of physical systems? This could be taken far below the threshold of what we normally imagine to constitute a psychological mind.



What Chalmers says is much more generous:

“Either there is something that it is like to be a mouse or there is not, and it is not up to us to define the mouse’s experience into or out of existence. To be sure, there is probably a continuum of conscious experience from the very faint to the very rich; but if something has conscious experience, however faint, we cannot stipulate it away.”



There are a few things I was trying to address in this thread …

Specifically, when did the phenomenon of experience arise? Is it ubiquitous? Has it always existed? Could it be as Chalmer’s proposed, experience, information from the inside; physics, information from the outside?

Thanks for all the replies!!!

At the heart of this book is the revolutionary idea that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but is a learned process brought into being...

I'm in total agreement with this sentence... although I'm not sure how far I'd go with the admittedly very interesting, but highly speculative narratives of Jaynes and Stephenson.

Principally, I don't think that it has to be a cataclysmic event which forces modern human consciousness into being - I think a gradual development forced by the hand of history and culture is just as likely.

But I do like the idea of ancient consciousness in which the principle organising narrative is that of the gods, rather than the "self" - which I would argue is an even more modern invention, within the last couple of hundred years.

 

[mulberryman]

In this book, Jaynes theorizes that ancient consciousness was radically different from modern consciousness. He suggests that ancient human beings had no sense of an interior, directing self. Rather, they accepted commands from what appeared to them to be an externalized agency, which they obeyed blindly, without question.

But I do like the idea of ancient consciousness in which the principle organising narrative is that of the gods, rather than the "self" - which I would argue is an even more modern invention, within the last couple of hundred years.

I would further argue that the internal sense of self is still today not unilateral, or at least ever-present within our thought processes. People today, on a whole, still do not often question command from true external sources. This sense of self appears to be of social construce and may in fact be an abberation of or distraction from true conciousness.

I think a distinction needs to be drawn between pure formless awareness and consciousness. Consciousness is the structures that interiorize the "outside" into your awareness. Awareness is what is aware(apologize for the circularity) of this interiority. Things like emotions, logic, self-awareness, these are all objects that you are aware off. They are not awareness itself.

Thus individuality is the natural adaptation to our perceptions of the external world and its social constructs. We may be aware without being conciousness, but as such we would have no sense of self as we have no sense of others. Such an existance may be more pure however, as there is no guarantee just what awareness is and where it actually stems from.

Consciousness is not a biological process, because I don't believe (as previously stated) that correct biology is a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. What is necessary is not just the biological functionality, but the presence of Others, and being-with them

And thus there is no guarantee that this individuality we are calling conciousness is not actually an illusion created to deal with information perceived from others and perhaps even just external stimuli.

My belief is that "we" live on eternally, timelessly, as part of tyhe collective whole of experience, but as that collective whole, not as an individual identity

And when that conciousness is not being used as when we are unconcious, and ultimatly after our physical bodies cease to function, who is to say that we do not return to that ultimate state of conciousness that is the absence of individualality. To put it simply, and specifically, that awareness is simply life, and life is not simply a biological process.

 

[fastandbulbous]

To put it simply, and specifically, that awareness is simply life, and life is not simply a biological process.

Er, biology is defined as the study of living things and their underlying processes, so the above statement makes no sense (well to me)