Are all living things conscious?
I was quite surprised recently at the number of people I've spoken to that consider other animals as not "conscious".
It's a difficult word to tackle because of semantics but as far as I gathered, they meant has a lack of an "I" sensation/experience of self, therefore little to no agency to apply to a self, and act mindlessly on mere precribed impulses.
I'm not sure I agree. But want to extend the discussion to you. If you think living things are "conscious" or aware or have a "me" from which they reference the world, does this apply to all living things? Or where is the cutoff point? And why?
Finally, do we not ultimately base this in the "how much of us do we see in them?" Principle and is this a reliable way of discerning others beings experiences or whether they have them or not. For me it seems a bit sapiocentric.
It's a difficult word to tackle because of semantics but as far as I gathered, they meant has a lack of an "I" sensation/experience of self, therefore little to no agency to apply to a self, and act mindlessly on mere precribed impulses.
I'm not sure I agree. But want to extend the discussion to you. If you think living things are "conscious" or aware or have a "me" from which they reference the world, does this apply to all living things? Or where is the cutoff point? And why?
Finally, do we not ultimately base this in the "how much of us do we see in them?" Principle and is this a reliable way of discerning others beings experiences or whether they have them or not. For me it seems a bit sapiocentric.
Comments (92)
I would say plants are not, but I'm not at all sure about that, given recent discoveries. So I'll only say that plankton probably are not, bacteria probably not, but amoeba and paramecia are. They respond to stimuli and environmental conditions; actively seek food and favourable temperature. They 'know' what's inside and outside of their membrane (skin) and what their physical requirements are. To me, that's awareness the difference between 'self' and 'other', and that's how I define consciousness.
Quoting Benj96
Not necessarily, because some people deny consciousness even to dogs (contrary to the evidence of their own experience) and human babies. I don't know why that is - I don't know why they should be so jealous of this most attainable and least reducible commodity.
A concept of self is much more rare and specific, human babies clearly don't have it in my opinion, I would even say it's more of an idea that we are taught as opposed to an inborn attribute.
What about a severely disabled person who can basically only respond and react to stimuli such as pain, hunger, light, shock, etc? Are they conscious?
What is consciousness, really. An excellent, if not tired prospect. "I think, therefore I am" or "I am, therefore I think". A worm tills the ground, knowing neither sleep nor gender, yet makes for an excellent buddy to procure a tasty trout from a nearby river. Though I doubt if worms could speak they would have very much to say! Or would they?
Unfortunately I have no yes or no answer for you, at present that is, rather some, what I believe to relevant if not interesting musings for your consideration, as shown above.
Recent science indicates that trees and other vegetation in a forest communicate with one another through a complex network of fungi. You could consider that the brain of a communal entity. Whether individual plants have similar capacities is doubtful but not impossible. (Bad news for conscientious vegetarians!)
Quoting Outlander
If they react, yes. If they're catatonic or in a coma, you can't tell.
Quoting Outlander
"Stop the pain!" comes to mind, quickly followed by "I want to stay alive." The trout would say much the same, and so would the man.
Seeing consciousness as paradigmatically human is so limiting. If I allow myself to be aware of a spectrum of consciousness that extends far below my familiarity, I likewise open my intellect to the possibilities of consciousness far beyond my imagination.
It seems to me anything responding to outside stimuli is conscious, in some sense, but only beings with 'experience' can be considered sentient. Seems to clear up the mess for the most part...
Quoting goremand
I do think it's fair to say, though, that the capacity is peculiar to some specific type.
I think a better word that 'conscious' might be 'sentient'. Sentience refers to the capacity to perceive and experience sensations or feelings, such as pain, pleasure, emotions, and basic awareness of one's surroundings. Sentience does not necessarily imply a high level of cognitive or self-awareness. It can exist in organisms that react to stimuli and have some form of subjective experience but do not possess complex thought processes or self-awareness.
Consciousness is a more complex and multifaceted concept. It includes self-awareness, the ability to think, reason, reflect, and have a sense of identity and an ongoing stream of thoughts and experiences.
Consciousness involves a higher level of cognitive functioning and is often associated with the ability to introspect, make decisions, and have a deep awareness of one's own mental state and the external world.
I'm inclined to say that all sentient beings have a primitive sense of self in that they have to distinguish themselves from their environment, seek sustenance, avoid danger, and so on. Plainly many simple creatures lack conscious awareness in the sense that humans and higher animals have it (dogs, whales, birds, elephants, etc) so are not self-conscious in the same sense. (Arthur Schopenhauer published a book on the idea that simple creatures are like somnambulists, sleep-walkers, who execute sophisticated behaviours, like a spider building a web, with no awareness of what they're doing.)
In any case, I recognise an ontological distinction between sentient beings, plant life, and rational sentient beings such as humans, which I think is often called into question.
From what I understand from cognitive science, the hierarchy is Consciousness->Sentience->whatever you want to call higher-level functions of sentient beings such as higher primates.
Consciousness only entails awareness.
Sentience requires feelings about that awareness.
Higher-level functions require something more. Rationality?
The oddest word out there is 'emotions'. What humans mean by that word is ambiguous - when not prejudicial - in reference to the experience of non-humans. Anything with nerves, or even primitive chemical receptors, perceive sensation, differentiate beneficial from harmful environmental conditions, seek the first while avoiding the second.
Whether a negative input can be called 'pleasure' or 'pain' is problematic: we use these words imprecisely and hardly ever attempt to draw a comprehensible distinction between the perception of harmful input and the experience of pain.
'Basic awareness' is evident in any organism that actively responds to change in its environment (It's not probable that sunflowers and morning glories are active in their response to sunlight, but it's evident that a paramecium moves away from negative chemical stimuli.)
I very much doubt the elements of that definition come as a package. Rather, I think they're consequent and cumulative, as evolution built on simple capabilities and equipment to produce ever more complex ones. No solid lines in between; just continuity.
I think the leap from inorganic matter to organisms is just that - a leap. Says Ernst Mayr, one of the heavyweight biologists of the 20th Century, says 'The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!
I had rather thought it was the opposite. Crabs and lobsters are sentient beings, but would we call them 'consciously aware'?
No. All living things are responsive, some relatively very few are "conscious" (and only intermittenly).
For me "the cutoff of "consciousness" would be any organism with at least a central nervous system sufficiently complex enough to generate a phenomenal self model (the function of which being to facilitate adaptively coordinating the organism's behavior with both external and internal stimuli) by interacting with an environment. I suspect this subset of organisms includes many (though not all or most) mammals like primates, cetaceans, elephantidae ... canines, felines, ursidae (bears), etc; and even apparently cephalopods.
If "consciousness" suggests more than just some degree of (i) awareness or (ii) self-awareness but also (iii) self-awareness of others-as-self-aware-selves, then "conscious" organisms have to have biological capabilities repertoire of behaviors complex enough to recognize other "conscious" organisms as "conscious" organisms like themselves (with a self) rather by reflex-instinct being incapable of discerning other "conscious" organisms from living food or waste.
A theory of mind. It's all we have to go on with each other since "consciousness" is (intractably?) subjective; otherwise we humans are all just zombies to one another.
Quoting Vera Mont
:up: :up:
Quoting Vera Mont
:fire: ... like the simplistic fossil-picture of the reptilian, mammalian & sapient layers of the human brain.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/sentience#:~:text=Sentience%20is%20the%20capacity%20to,From%3A%20Neuroscience%2C%202022
"Sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations, to have affective consciousness, subjective states that have a positive or negative valence (Chandroo et al., 2004)"
To my mind, this indicates something more than merely awareness, or 'thinking' which consciousness entails. A crab would be conscious, but has no subjective sense of desire or aversion, merely a drive to a biologically necessary outcome (toward survival).
(also, i've heard the term Sapience to refer to 'rationality' or whatever it is we're discussing as a 'higher' form of whichever of the above two is, in fact, the more peculiar).
Where does evolution begin? Did inanimate matter evolve? If not, how is this relevant?
Quoting Wayfarer
Why wouldn't we?
Quoting 180 Proof
I think this requires a level of intelligence and reasoning far beyond mere consciousness.
Quoting AmadeusD
I think that's what I mean in the above. An organism can be awake, register changes, respond to stimuli, without thinking. It can do all that, plus feel some level of fear and need, without thinking. It can do all that, become aware that other active things in its environment can be pursued or evaded, without understanding that they, too, are aware of this. I don't think a cat realizes that the injured mouse or bird in its mouth is anything more than food or a plaything. It takes a pretty high level of cognition to identify another organism as being like itself. Humans have yet to master this feat with any consistency of application.
When I work that out, Ill be sure to invite you to my Nobel Ceremony. Although Ive always been rather drawn to the charmingly-named panspermia, the theory that organic compounds are dispersed throughout interstellar space and combine in various forms wherever the conditions are suitable.
The sources I consulted put sentience before consciousness, but its contested. Sapience is supposed to represent wisdom - the Latin sapientia is distinguished from scientia.
Is it the current scientific consensus that inanimate matter evolves from to simple to complex in a similar pattern to organisms?
Cats & dogs seem intelligent enough. Maybe what I wrote wasn't clear there wasn't anything in that post about "mere consciousness".
I don't know if it's a consensus. That is the theory of a-biogenesis (literally 'life from non-living'.) It is of course one of the burning questions of the Creationism culture wars - ID people say that life must originate with divine intelligence, whereas scientific naturalism of course sees no such requirement.
But there's another point, which is that the theory of evolution doesn't account for how life originated. Given there are species, it explores how they evolve but it doesn't really provide an account of how it started. There's a often-quoted letter by Charles Darwin musing about the origin of life in a 'warm little pond' but it was not a serious effort at theorising. I think some of the current favourites are undersea vents, where complex chemicals are subjected to a big range of conditions, although I'm hazy on the detail.
Philosophically, I'm of the view that organisms are categorically different to inorganic matter in a variety of ways - they seek homeostasis, heal from injury, grow, replicate, and (naturally) evolve into new species. I'm not a fan of the attitude that as everything is created from the table of elements, that there is no essential difference between, say, rocks and microbes. I think there is.
The question isn't whether we would call them consciously aware, but whether they are. (What is it like to be a bat?) The problem lies in attempting to apply a standard to something that we know exists across a spectrum, from the standpoint of our own existence which operates from a specific portion of that spectrum. Indeed, we can see the spectrum of consciousness evolve in the individual human mind from infancy. In fact, we have all experienced it. If it is possible to be "less conscious" (but still conscious) it is also possible to be "more conscious".
Per my earlier post, it makes no sense to be restrictive in the definition.
The great leap to which referred earlier. What I'm asking is: had the non-life been evolving to that point, or did evolution begin there, like a biological big bang?
Quoting Wayfarer
So what? I thought nobody attributed conscious to non-life.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's what I said! So, there is no disagreement here.
Consciousness is a cognitive process, so while it is debatable whether some beings with really primitive nervous systems such as worms are conscious, single-celled organism and even sponges are surely not conscious we are not panpsychists, are we?
I think the ability to problem-solve can be helpful to determine consciousness. A plant may solve a labyrinth by following the path that has greatest brightness, but we know it will always choose that path because the growth pattern of a plant is estimulated by light. We may give a geometric puzzle to a raven and each raven may try to solve it a different way, we don't know how they will try first; possibility of error and the ability to randomly choose a method may indicate that some thinking is going on.
[hide="Reveal"]A reductionist physicalist (like me) will say that all thinking is chemical reactions, but that is unproductive to the topic.[/hide]
Quoting Wayfarer
Chemiosynthetic theory, where the first living beings were thermophilic procrarionta who dwelt in volcanic ridges.
[s]Half of the scientific terms above may have been misspelt.[/s]
Quoting Wayfarer
Typically metabolism with self-replication is used to separate life from non-life.
Quoting goremand
This sentence might be surprisingly helpful. Can we knock a sponge unconscious? Killing it does not count.
Oh, yes. I was talking about the sophisticated mental feat of recognizing another as being a self, like themselves. Whether fish understand this within their own species, we don't read their behaviour well enough to be sure; social species with which we can't communicate effectively, obviously do. But we can communicate with exceptionally clever birds, like parrots and crows: they recognize us as sentient.
Domestic cats and dogs have a greater capacity for communicating across species gaps (I find that quite remarkable, actually), as they do with us. Clearly they recognize one another and us as being just as self-aware as they are, to have individual personalities, temperaments and volition. Within their social group, they have friends, rivals, status; they know which family member is most inclined to play, to snuggle with, to open doors or cans on demand, etc.
But this recognition doesn't seem to extend to prey - in this, they are very like humans - and probably all predators: they categorize and objectify selectively.
Intentionality, however, is a widely accepted property possessed by conscious beings. The property of being directed towards something, as in behavior or speech about something.
Quoting goremandI agree. I like Nagels definition in What is it like to be a bat?
I dont see a concept of selfhood as being necessary for that. The concept of self is certainly an aspect of human consciousness, and likely other animals. But not necessarily a requirement of consciousness in general.
Quoting goremandIn Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, Anil Seth discusses many ways the word consciousness has been used, and differentiates between wakefulness and consciousness. The dog might be dreaming, which is a state of consciousness, while knocked out.
Quoting goremandI don't know if you mean taught in the sense of someone literally setting out to teach that lesson. I suspect not, since I've never heard of anyone doing so. I assume you mean taught while interacting with others, which i agree with. I doubt someone raised without the slightest human contact, or interaction from whatever machines kept it alive, would develop a sense of self. Perhaps hearing ideas from outside our own heads is key to noticing self. The idea that there is no self without other.
I believe there are 2 conceptually distinct matters here.
First, there is the question of subjective experience - whether a being has sense experiences like taste, vision, etc.: that is, "what it is like" phenomena. For example, if one lies on the grass and gazes up at a cloudless sky, one experiences "what it is like" to see light in the blue range of wavelengths. And that "what it is like-ness" is different when you look at something that produces light of red wavelengths.
Second, there is the matter of a "me" from which, as you say, is the point of reference for evaluations of the world.
I think one can easily imagine an entity (whether an animal or some automated system) that has a "me", but does not have subjective experiences. My point is that you are talking, it seems to me, about 2 different things.
Assuming you accept my analysis, which of these 2 issues is of interest to you?
A rock is moved only by external forces. But a living organism is self-moving and self-sustaining to various degrees. So in order to continue to live, it must be able to interact with its environment for sustenance. On another thread, we discussed how Venus fly-catchers and earthworms have rudimentary senses to help them obtain nutrients. Therefore, it's essential for animated matter to be aware (to some degree) of what's going-on around it. That's what senses are for. And the human brain/mind is merely an advanced sensory organ.
Therefore I would guess that "all living things" are at least minimally conscious. But, it's possible that only the more highly-developed (brainy) animals are Self-Conscious. So Consciousness covers a broad range of Knowingness, As to where is the cut-off, your guess is as good as mine. As to why consciousness is rampant on our little ball of earth, and seems to be absent in the other 99.99% of the Cosmos : who's asking, and why? :wink:
I think we've talked about this already, but I don't like that definition at all. Bundling phenomenological properties into the definition kills the word for me.
Quoting Patterner
Yeah pretty much, having a pet dog might be enough even. I think the usefulness of the concept comes from drawing conclusions about others from observing yourself.
I also don't think having a concept of self is such a special thing, computers have it is as well ("This PC").
Quoting Gnomon
What about a roomba? They need to crawl back to their recharge station occasionally to sustain themselves.
Article
A sea urchin has no nerve system, yet it can identify the presence of a predator and scoop sand and gravel on top of itself as camouflage to reduce the risk of detection. So one might ask if and how important is the complexity of a nerve system for something to be conscious?
I'm thinking the "what it is like to be..." is due to subjective experience. Kind of the same thing. If I did not have subjective experience, there would be nothing it is like to be me.
Do you think consciousness is subjective experience, but it doesn't lead to "what it is like to be..."? If not, if you don't think consciousness is subjective experience, and you don't think it is the concept of self, then what do you think consciousness is?
Apologies if you've told me this before. My 60 year old brain doesn't retain what it once would have.
Most actions that human's take are pretty much out of similar strings of causal behavior as animals. The only difference is that we are adaptable through taking a plan of action. We can evaluate our surroundings to reach a specific purpose. Our behavior looks complex, we sound complex, but we forget that we're just the tip of the spear when it comes to consciousness. If we view the animal kingdom more in terms of a gradient of conscious abilities; since our consciousness evolved; there should be other animals who have similar conscious experiences as us, but remain limited enough to not reach our capacity.
Ravens, for instance, seem to be able to form culture around behaviors. They can spread "ideas" to other ravens who then follow. In that sense they need to understand the difference between a self and another raven in order to understand that they have a perspective that the other raven does not.
The problem with people saying that animals don't have an inner experience like us, is that we don't even know how to define our own inner experience. Our experience of qualia is unknown between people and that means its even more unknown between us and animals.
We can only judge animals out of our standards of behavior, which means we are sure to miss any sort of self-aware qualia of an animal.
One experiment that we've used to make some kind of measurement is through mirrors and the idea of self-awareness out of how lifeforms acts in front of their own reflections. If they behave like they recognize the mirror image as themselves, they are probably able to internalize that the image is of themselves. So far there are a few animals that seem to behave like this, elephants, chimpanzees, gorillas, ravens etc. But we still don't know the differences between our internal experience and that of these animals. They might have an awareness but handle that qualia differently, they may be more aware than we seem to believe.
Some of them may even be on the brink of their own evolutionary step towards high intelligence, we just don't know. But that would be an interesting scenario; if an animal group started to show signs of high intelligence and the ability to study and contemplate about us humans, what then?
Because there's no reason to believe that our consciousness were just some fluke. Our level of consciousness may be a very rare trait, but seen as animals exist in a large gradient range of different conscious abilities and self-awareness, there's definitely an evolutionary incentive towards developing our level of consciousness.
In my theory, that's due to adaptability, because our consciousness is highly synced to that survivability trait. So if some other animal started developing highly adaptable behaviors, then it might not be far fetched to assume that they may form consciousness in a similar form to us.
I would equate life being conscious with being aware of its surroundings and environment and its ability to adapt to environmental changes. The issue then is that plants can respond to environmental changes so does that make them conscious? You could apply a stricter definition of course as being conscious and alive are not quite the same thing.
In that case youd have to start with the concept of personhood which as you rightly pointed out is sapiocentric.
I think there are different levels of being conscious from plants being able to respond to stimuli to human beings who are aware of their thoughts or aware of being aware (meta-aware).
I am skeptical of phenomenal properties, so if it were up to me I would strip that out of the definition, thus "salvaging" the word.
Quoting Patterner
Consciousness also has a functional component, when someone loses consciousnesses they also lose functionality. As far as I am concerned that is all there is to it.
Quoting Patterner
No worries, it was many months ago on my thread about illusionism.
That is how I use the word, yes.
Quoting Arbü1237
As in This bacterium is alive?
Being conscious implies having subjective experience, which is related but different from having intentionality. Intentionality is typically defined as a certain type of conscious mental state, so intentionality requires consciousness either way.
Quoting Joshs
It seems that the statement "Consciousness dictates life" implies that only the things that are conscious are alive, which is wrong as many things are alive and not conscious. If the latter is denied, he is then saying that everything that is alive is conscious, which I refuted here:
Quoting Lionino
It stands that, unless we admit of computers being conscious or souls or the like, the only relationship between being alive and consciousness is that the former is a necessary condition for the latter a counterfactual if you will.
Quoting Lionino
Otoh, autopoietic systems theory and embodied, enactivist cognitivism understands a living system as functionally integral and normatively oriented around goals and purposes, which allows us to trace back the precursors of cognition and emotion to the simplest living organisms.
Evan Thompson writes:
Does it imply that unconsciousness is what dictates the term "death"?
When you are asleep, your body is alive, but your mind is unconscious.
It's a relational property shared by different types of conscious mental states.
SEP
Without intentionality, thoughts would be empty, vision blind, desires aimless and so on.
I don't know of a conscious mental state that doesn't have intentionality (disregarding hallucinations, phantom pain and the like).
* Edited for clarity
Sleepers not unconscious just dormant.
Being "dormant" is for the animals (bears, toads, snakes ... etc) having long winter sleep usually from 3 - 4 months. "Being dormant" can be used with some plants too. You don't use the word "dormant" on humans.
As others have noted, a philosophical discussion of Consciousness needs to be more narrowly defined than just basic chemical or neural Sentience. For example, the sensory ability to distinguish light from dark is an evolutionary advantage for many sub-conscious organisms. Hence, the emergence of light-sensing organs, mostly based on light activated chemicals such as Rhodopsin and Chlorophyll. Those sensations are the foundation of Feelings, but don't amount to Awareness-of-feelings until centralized by a brain. In that case, electrical neurons are necessary to channel sensations to the central processor, for sorting into Good or Bad For Me.
Sapience is sentience developed into Intelligence, as in homo sapiens. But sapience requires some degree of Self-Awareness (a sense of Me) : a reference point upon which to base decisions that are in self-interest. For organisms with a physical Brain and metaphysical Self-Awareness, the next step is to develop a functional Mind. Mind is the basis of Intelligence, and according to Michael Levin : "all intelligence is really collective intelligence". That's because the brain merely coordinates the sentience of multiple sensory cells. And Evolution, since the emergence of single cell living organisms, seems to have been working for eons toward the sophisticated ability to know-what-you-know (Self-Consciousness).
Scientific American magazine (Feb 2024) has an article entitled Minds Everywhere, which reports on recent research into cellular Cognition. The first example is a flatworm with no centralized brain, but with cells that can regenerate a head with eye-spots for light sensing. It can find food and avoid danger automatically, with no apparent sense-of-self. Although most plants have no eye-spots, they have leaves with chlorophyll-filled cells that perform a similar function --- in some cases to even move toward the light. A distributed-nucleus single-cell Slime Mold is not even as sophisticated as a plant, but without a brain or neurons, it can coordinate its oozing cells to move toward food, and to avoid danger. The article even reports an experiment in which a slime mold navigates a maze {image below}, requiring not just sensation, but learning. So, the emergence of Consciousness is a continuum, with no obvious cut-off point, such as homo sapiens.
Based on such discoveries, Levin has concluded that "everything that's alive is doing this amazing thing" : Cognition. Which appears to answer the thread question in the affirmative. But it also indicates that just sensation & coordination & self-control does not amount to what we philosophers experience as Intelligent Consciousness. Which is a recent innovation of evolution, after billions of sol-years of groping in the dark, for slight advantages of fitness --- toward some future state that seems to require coordinated Complexity & Self-Awareness & Intelligence : a Person, not a Thing. :smile:
SLIME MOLD NAVIGATING A MAZE and avoiding a hazardous obstacle
I don't know enough about IIT to know how much I think it's the answer to the mystery of consciousness. But I think information is definitely the key.
Consider an avalanche. Two rocks on a mountain are held together by ice. Sun melts the ice, and one rock moves. Next thing you know, the mountainside is a gigantic avalanche. When it ends, there's a pile of rocks and snow at the bottom.
There is nothing other than physical cause & effect going on. Just billiard balls. There is no information present. No moment of an avalanche, no interaction of any objects or particles, represents anything or has any meaning. Neither do the overall process or the pile of rocks and snow at the bottom. It may be that some rocks land on top of each other, looking like a tower. Other rocks might form a cave. But no arrangement, no matter what pattern, will form because of any initial conditions that guided events to bring about that arrangement.
DNA is different. DNA is information. It has meaning. The order of its base pairs represents sequences of amino acids. The amino acids link together to form proteins. The amino acids don't just happen to form by chance. Things don't just happen to bump into each other, and voilà. It's not coincidence. As Marcello Barbieri says:Quoting Marcello BarbieriThe proteins that are constructed build the organism, then run it. They are structure, hormones, enzymes, and various other things that keep a living organism alive. And they are all constructed according to the information in DNA. All life is the result of information in action.**
If information is a necessary ingredient of consciousness, then what is better qualified to be it's starting point than active information? At least a beginning. A zygote is not conscious. But it has a starting point. Which no non-living thing has. And, as it develops, so will its consciousness. Same with the first life on earth. It wouldn't have been conscious, but it would have been the starting point of consciousness for all of us, just as it was the starting point of life for all of us.
Whether talking about a zygote developing or the first life evolving, consciousness grows as more and more information is processed. This means sensory apparatus appearing and evolving. It also means thinking elements appearing and evolving, rather than simply an eyespot hooked directly to a flagellum, giving a simple input > response. That's a huge advantage when nothing else in the world can do even that. The one-eyed man is king in the land of the blind, after all. But when there are two kinds of sensors hooked to the flagellum, it's better. And better still when there is something between the sensors and flagellum, weighing the strength of the different inputs, and determining which the flagellum responds to. (These things are discussed in [I]Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos[/I], by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam.)
**As opposed to what i guess might be called static information. A book is filled with information, but does nothing. I can read the book, and learn that information. But I need not act. The information can just sit in the book and my head, and nothing ever has to come of it. Otoh, DNA ... compels? RNA polymerase is very important for transcription, which is the process that makes messenger RNA molecules to store the information from a section of the DNA molecule. Messenger RNA then goes to the ribosomes, which make the proteins. Ribosomes are made of proteins and ribosomal RNA. And DNA is what makes it all happen.
I agree. I think consciousness is far broader a term than we give it credit for. We too often coin the evaluation of consciousness as how it relates to our own, and that surely is, human bias.
Interesting. I would argue that if something can experience fear, pain and adversity, then that must come from a sense of self to which such conditions are impressed upon. And I'd would say that at the very least, higher order animals certainly experience fear as they attack when cornered. That is "self preservation" and as the term would suggest it would seem to necessitate a "self" in which to defend. A certain expectation or demand to survive. An "I" that wishes to live on.
I believe separating "self" from "consciousness" is tricky. As I can only imagine something without a self as being in an non conscious state and one with a self as being conscious or at least unconscious with activity such as dreams and nightmares that lend themselves to a sense of self.
I have to agree. Necessity is the mother of all invention and I'm sure consciousness is no exception here. I would love to witness another animal make those leaps. Funnily enough it brings to mind the "planet of the apes" franchise. Its fascinating in the sense that it seems plausible. If it happened once for us when conditions were ripe, why think it impossible for other animals at the very least are closest relatives.
In my opinion, your thinking here is the result of rationalizing (as opposed to explaining) animal behavior in comfortable terms. The mechanisms of fear and self-preservation in, um... "higher order animals" I believe can be explained without imparting ideas of "self" on them.
I do not understand how you make the distinction, but do you not see patterns of self-preservation in what I suppose you would call "lower order" lifeforms?
I think there are a lot of misunderstandings in this. Consciousness is expressed differently by different philosophers. Simply consciousness can be attributed to awareness. (Not going into the depth or any philosophical concept). Awareness is there for almost all living beings. But things get complicated when the description of consciousness changes. Like that of phenomenology. Different between the ontic and ontological subjects play a great part in it. Self is another complicated notion and these are not one and the same things.
That way we could assume that different living things must inherently be conscious in different ways. Because the self -the body, its sensory organs and how it perceives its environment is different.
I believe that "consciousness" is a spectrum of capabilities. When we use the expression, we are using it in a manner which is influenced by our own consciousness. This makes sense, since the meaning we tie to a word is dependent upon our experiences.
When looking at our own consciousness, it seems to involves things like capacity for memory, emotions, reasoning, responsiveness to stimuli, etc. So, we might ask to what degree a thing is conscious insofar as it has such and such capacities. I would say that my dog is more conscious than say a plant, but I'd be willing to attribute some level of consciousness even to plants.
In that case , aren't non-living things' consciousness different nature to the living things consciousness? They can't possibly be the same type, class or nature of consciousness. If so, how would they be different? If not so, why wouldn't they be different?
I don't think so. Their consciousness is exactly the same type. Both are aware of something. What is different is what they are aware of. In the case of dead things, not very much.
That much is not needed: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/conscious
Things without a mind are not conscious/aware.
I Wouldn't say we are using 'conscious' in the same sense in the two sentences:
"Tim is conscious and in the hospital"
and
"Human's are conscious due to their brains"
In the first example, its clearly being used synonymously with being aware, and in the second sense, which is the sense I believe OP to be using, we can't simply substitute "awareness".
Well, I would.
Quoting 013zen
That the substitution sounds funky in that one phrase is a matter that the language relies on pragmatics more than semantics in that case. The two words pretty much mean the same thing, just like "fast" and "quick" mean the same thing.
How about in an instance where we have two individuals: Tim and Nancy. Both recently awoke in the hospital after major surgery. Tim had triple bypass surgery, and Nancy had a full frontal lobotomy.
Clearly, I would say:
"Tim is conscious and in the hospital"
and
"Nancy is conscious and in the hospital"
But, if I were to ask in the sense of the OP: "Is Tim conscious in the same sense as Nancy?" we would all, I think, answer 'no'.
Sure, but there are no things without a mind.
Ok, so you are a panpsychists. Most people disagree, so do I. We can leave it at that.
Quoting 013zen
Damn.
Quoting 013zen
Are lobomites conscious? If yes, they are conscious in the same way; if no, "Nancy is conscious and in the hospital" is an incorrect statement, and should be changed.
The counterargument is that what we mean by "conscious" is in fact an umbrella of related properties. But this is not a point I want to debate so I will just concede.
How do you imagine an intelligent animal presents that "I' or "self" to itself?
To clarify my question, for me, its easy, I use those words "I" and "myself" and variations thereof.
Even if I "think" I am contemplating "myself" silently, without reference to those words, those words underlie such thinking.
How, I wonder, for animals?
They prefer to be called frontally incapable, I believe :p
But, my point is I don't know how to answer your question. If you're asking, "Are people that have had lobotomies aware of things?" I would say, in many cases - yes. But, I would think that they've lost some meaningful capacity that I think could be understood as a lessening of consciousness.
I'm curious what you mean by "awareness" though, like, if say, a motion detecting camera spots me, and follows my movements, would that count as awareness, or is it something more complicated for you?
I don't mean much else than what is understood by the word in English. That conscious and aware cannot be replaced one by the other in some contexts is no mystery some grammarians claim there is no such thing as a perfect synonym , but generally those two words are synonyms, the thesaurus would show so.
Quoting 013zen
Good question. Most people would say sponges are not conscious, but they are "aware" of their surroundings because they react to stimulus. But then again, are they reacting any differently than when a rock reacts when we kick it by flying away into my neighbour Giorgios' window? In a way, a sponge reacts to its environment through a series of chemical reactions in its structure, which are physics-based in the deep end it is all Newton's third law. We call mechanisms "responsive" too, when we touch a phone's screen but it doesn't register the touch, it is not responsive. Yet in most cases calling the phone "aware" sounds off. You could say the phone is aware of you touching it (touchscreen software is running) but a virus may be blocking the script that opens the app or slides the screen.
All in all, this is barely even philosophy, it is pragmatics of the English language.
As Wittgenstein once said:
All philosophy is Critique of language (4.0031).
Quoting Lionino
I would be willing to ascribe consciousness to a sponge, just not the same level of consciousness as I would ascribe to you.
Quoting Lionino
I take your point, that both are the product of mechanical laws, but I could say there is a distinction to made here insofar as the sponges reacting to external stimulus is the result of an internal process responding to the external stimuli, while the rocks is due to an external process acting on the rock with no internal process.
The phone is a good mediator example insofar as it does have an internal state that responds to external stimulus, but still I think theres a distinction here between the phone and the sponge. I cant quite tease it out, yet, though. :chin:
What do you think?
Not the biggest of fans.
Quoting 013zen
The question is on what grounds, if you are not a panpsychist.
Quoting 013zen
I don't think there is any. Let me know if you find out.
I am not a panpsychist, I find the position unintelligible.
There seems to be a meaningful distinction between on the one hand, things like:
1. rocks, cups, tables, etc
and
2. amoebas, sponges, dogs, humans, etc
and it doesn't appear to be due to complexity.
In what this distinction subsists is the question.
Quoting LioninoI would say they are reacting differently. The rock kicked through the window is a chain of brute-force, physical interactions. Like dominoes.
In [I]Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged From Chaos[/I], Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam give a bare-bones definition of [I]mind[/I]:
They then discuss several increasingly complex minds. The sponge is not one of them. They start with the simplest existing mind, that of the archaea, which has two sensors (rhodopsin) and two doers (flagella, more properly called archaella). When the light changes, the rhodopsin changes shape. This begins a chain of chemical events that reach the archaella, which move, thus moving the archaea.
Chemical reactions are, of course, nothing but physical events. But it's not the same as a solid object hitting another solid object, and moving it simply because that's what happens when solid objects hit each other. If the archaea is not reacting any differently than the kicked rock, are we?
Quoting Patterner
So is the sponge, but with more steps.
One does not need to think a lot to see the issue with this physicalist account of what a "mind" is. The problem is that this definition of "mind" also describes things that we don't call mind. At this point, you are just changing the definition of 'mind' to mean something that seems pretty close to what we call metabolism.
Well, that is not what thinking means. I can think without an input (beyond any argument if one rejects weak tabula rasa¹), and I can think without producing useful behaviour. In any case, I can make a little Arduino robot right now (in two weeks once the Amazon parts arrive) that does exactly that, but the robot is not thinking.
Also, there should be a space around the em dashes, ugh.
Quoting Patterner
There are plenty of things that have sensors and doers and are robots. It seems they focus only on life, but life is a self-replicating thing with metabolism which is why virus don't typically fall under life, no metabolism , so they are talking about the metabolic aspect of life and calling it "mind", but we already have thousands of great biology books that talk exactly about that without doing such semantic juggling,
1 The view that the mind needs experience to work, against the strong version that states the mind starts completely empty.
Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam might be brilliant neuroscientists, but they are clearly not good philosophers.
Yes, all. Including organisms and plants. They all perceive and react to their environment. Because they all want to survive. And multiply.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Enactivist approaches argue that perception and reaction are not sufficient for consciousness. What is required is a self-organizing and self-correcting anticipative purposiveness. Living systems are normatively oriented, defining their environment in relation to their ongoing functioning. Consciousness is intrinsically affective , and affectivity arises out of the organismss ability recognize what is better or worse for it in relation to how it is functioning. Its purposes and aims cannot be reduced to simple survival or multiplication but the survival of a normative way of functioning.
Quoting SEP
Quoting IEP
Quoting Chalmers
And here are quotes about it.
In this article, Goff writes:
In this Ted Talk, Chalmers says:
In [I]Panpsychism in the West[/I], Skrbina writes:
It seems those quotes generally agree with my definition :grin:
But I got it from the IEP.
Quoting Patterner
Seems like a kind of biopsychism then https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/20323/
I am aware of that view. But it ultimately reminds me of idealism, though there is likely some minute difference between the two.
Not sure why you quoted me with the title of the thread, but consciousness require awareness. It doesn't require self-awareness, but awareness of the processes that occurs to them and reactions by them. A rock isn't measurably aware of the hammer hitting it, a bug is.
But I still don't know what you are actually answering to or why you quoted the thread's title as if I asked it?
Well, enactivism holds that cognition is a necessary condition for the existence of consciousness. In my discussions with people on the subject of consciousness, I realized that most of them add such conditions, even thinking. So, anyone can add what condition one thinks is necessary for consciousness. So, what this actually means is different definitions of consciousness. That is everyone has a different perspective on the subject. This reminds of the alegory of different people looking at an elephant from different angles. So any fruitful discussion or conclusion on this subject is actually impossible, isnt it?
Quoting Joshs
This is exactly what I said. Here we see moods, feelings and emotions being part of consciuousness. So, according to this, if I don't have any particular mood, feeling or emotion it means that I am unconscious!
Do you see where do all these "additives" to consciousness lead? If I'm just looking at a wall, without having any cognition and without thinking or feeling anything --just looking-- it means I am unconscious! :smile:
Yes, I did.
Quoting Christoffer
None of them requires the other. Consciousness and awareness are similar concepts. They can be even used alternatively in some cases.
Quoting Christoffer
Right.
Quoting Christoffer
In my turn, I can't see your problem with this. :smile:
Isn't your title "Are all living things conscious?" a question? And isn't my answer congruent with it?
Are you conscious and aware of the fact that I didn't create this thread and that the title question isn't mine? :sweat:
Ha! You are right, my friend. The OP is Benj96's. I really don't know how I got you involved in all this.
But then, you should have stopped me from the beginning. Instead, you reacted with comments like "consciousness require awareness", etc. so you extended this wrong thread. This is not my fault! :smile:
Anyway, nice to make your acquaintance. See you around ...
Metabolism is involved for sure.
Quoting Patterner
True, but it is the belief that everything is made of mind-stuff. Not sure how it addresses things such as photons.
Quoting Patterner
If by beginning you mean something that must happen before thinking, the big bang is much more of "thinking" than the poison situation. If you mean the chemical reaction of a jellyfish avoiding poison is the most basic type of thinking, then the same question:
Quoting Lionino
Quoting LioninoI think there are panpsychists who after with that. Not all do. Some of us believe everything has a mental property, just everything has physical properties. I don't believe mass is mind-stuff. I don't believe charge is mind-stuff.
Quoting LioninoI don't think the BB sensed something in it's environment, and did something in response to what it sensed. Although people think about things outside of those parameters, it's how we start thinking when we're infants, and how thought began.
Quoting LioninoThe same answer: Yes. If there was no difference between the movement of the rock and the movement of the jellyfish, we wouldn't have biological sciences. But we do, because, even though it's physical processes in both cases, they are different types of processes.
A kicked rock is moved by simple physical contact. A jellyfish does not moved away from poison because the physical bulk of the poison pushes it away. There is no change to the rock, unless it breaks. And that tells us nothing. There are changes within the jellyfish, because its sensors reacted to the poison, and signals were sent to its means of propulsion.
What field of study says there is no difference?