Perhaps best to think of mind, consciousness and perception on a sliding scale, along a spectrum. To say that perception requires consciousness seems entirely correct until you think about it. Surely we want to draw a line between inanimate objects and living things, but the lines between those living things can get blurred. I think we commonly assume that a frog has something like consciousness if not as fully developed as ours. Frogs get to think themselves superior to the flies they eat.
Perceptions could still be mechanical/chemical and allow us to believe that we are more conscious than worms are. Sunflowers possess something a lot like a very rudimentary ability to perceive. Is this just an analog for what we think about as perception or a related ability?
Is it important?
Is it just a limitation of the glossary being used?
We have chemical, mechanical, even electrical connections to the world. Maybe other creatures have a different sense. Well, in fact they do. Maybe we have more senses than we commonly list in order to talk about perception, including our own.
This is not ontology or some other epistemological pursuit. It’s the search for vocabulary.
To call perceptions illusions is literal nonsense. It’s a category error.
When I said that perception requires consciousness then that is not meant as a ranking but to differentiate it from the not-alive matter.
But thinking about it, I rank activity, action to be a precursor to thinking. “First was the action, not the word” to paraphrase Goethe.
From the other end, I think that a consciousness which would lose entirely its connection to reality by not perceiving anything but its own thoughts would slowly but surely deteriorate, become non-functional, lose itself. It would happen due to having no standard, no selective pressures, to guide its regeneration and development and thus an entropy of sanity and awareness would occur, I believe.
So I think that perception is very high on the list in terms of what came first in the area of development of conscious nervous systems.
As for consciousness, it comes on many levels, but basically I attribute the most basic consciousness to all living things in varying degrees of complexity. With higher mammals self-awareness becomes even self-consciousness. A part of consciousness separating itself and observing itself, at least parts of it.
Also, when we say perception I was thinking at first about external senses but the internal senses of body function and regulation are rooted I believe in the most archaic area of our nervous system.
Serendipper - yes. If a flower can’t be said to perceive its source of nourishment when it moves toward it, we can not be said to perceive primary stimuli either. Our perception is still the exact same type of unconscious processes, it serves only to identify what we move towards and away from. Consciousness is a thin and rather arbitrary layer on top of the instincts, and it is still in the process of justifying itself through natural selection.
Nietzsche noted that consciousness may die out as an inefficient property of being. With the way people here talk about consciousness without having it, it doesn’t seem all that effective to lack it, either.
In fact we are perfectly equal to flowers on this level - our consciousness has very little to do with our instinctive responses.
Most of our perceptions and responses to these perceptions are unconscious. It is rather baffling to notice people aren’t aware of this in the 21t century.
People overestimate the importance of their consciousness. In fact, most people are not more conscious than a flower at all - you see how mindlessly they ignore that which they can’t deal with. As you notice with his selective responses, James is a prime example of flower-perception. He turns his head toward that which nurtures him, and away from what challenges him, and he does this with perfect consistency, and is not aware of it. That does not relate to consciousness, and I honestly don’t see most humans as being conscious.
It it simply a fact that most people respond automatically to what they perceive, and never to things that challenge their assumptions - they never arrive at a conscious process.
But I made a further point, about valuing being prior even to perception. Valuing as an automatic selecting of input in terms of what can be registered.
People imagine it is a very sophisticated and conscious process, valuing - but it is rather the basic mechanism on which all else rests.
So valuing is a term denoting selection, but denoting it in such a way as to indicate also the ground on which the principe of selection is possible.
Bell’s theorem is only about local hidden variables. Anyway, let’s suppose that the above is true. What would that mean? Quantum Physics understands randomness as probability: for instance, light is understood as a probability wave. Probability, however, is understood mathematically. But mathematics makes no sense for a variety of reasons. Let me start with one (chance), only to arrive at another (infinity).
Mathematically, chance is always understood as an exact 50%, which implies that A might just as well be not-A, contradicting the law of non-contradiction. One half is 50%. Two thirds relate to each other (i.e., each third to each other third) as 50/50. Etc. etc.
But, one might say, not all real numbers are rational, i.e., not all real numbers can be conceived as fractions. Pi for example is an irrational real number. But the thing is, phenomenologically, exact pi does not exist. Even a third, understood decimally, is three tenths of one plus three tenths of a tenth of one plus three tenths of a tenth of a tenth of one, etc. etc. The only difference between pi and any other number is that at least some of its decimals are different. The same holds in the simplest numeral system, binary. Below are binary approximations of pi and one third, respectively:
11.00100100001111110110
0.01010101010101010101
Even in binary, 1 relates to 1 as 50/50, of course. In fact, decimal 0.5 is 0.1 in binary. 0.1 + 0.1 = 1. But if there can be no numbers behind the “decimal” point, as in computer bits; if the bit must be either a 0 or a 1; then it’s not a matter of (0.1 + 0.1 = 1), but of (1 + 0 = 1) or (0 + 1 = 1). Either the 0.1 manifests as less than 0.1, or it does not. “Immediately after” the (supposed) Big Bang, some of what had come into existence was slightly less hot than the rest. Basically, the former became “vacuum” whereas the latter became “matter”. According to the concept of chance, it could just as well have been the other way round; that is, the former could just as well have been slightly hotter than the latter. 1 and 0 are interchangeable.
Now determinism says the opposite of this. But according to indeterminism, determinism and indeterminism are interchangeable. According to determinism, that is not true. In the first place, this means the values “true” and “false” are not interchangeable. “Not” and “too” are not interchangeable. Logic may be consistency, but consistency is a habit. “Binary one-third” has/is the habit of alternating 0 and 1, in that order, after the “decimal point”. Even pi is consistent–in being inconsistent! Being at its most basic is determining upon a 1 or a 0, willing a 1 or a 0.
“[Nietzsche] had drawn our attention to the fundamental distinction between the world which is of any concern to us and the world in itself, or between the world of appearance or fiction (the interpretations) and the true world (the text). What he seems to aim at is the abolition of that fundamental distinction[:] the world as will to power is both the world of any concern to us and the world in itself. Precisely if all views of the world are interpretations, i.e. acts of the will to power, the doctrine of the will to power is at the same time an interpretation and the most fundamental fact, for, in contradistinction to all other interpretations, it is the necessary and sufficient condition of the possibility of any ‘categories.’” (Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil”.)
I was just showing that randomness does exist because otherwise we could argue that the universe is fully determined. The existence of true randomness is the roadblock that makes determinism impossible. That’s all it necessarily means.
Math is a construct. It doesn’t exist in reality.
I don’t believe infinity exists either. The only thing there can be an infinite amount of is nothing. Big can of worms, I know.
PI assumes circles exist. Maybe circles are Planck-length-segmented-polygons. It could be that perfect circles and PI are both constructs… as well as infinity. Alternatively, maybe circles exist, but straight lines (diameters) do not. It could be that PI is rational in the real world, but not in our model. Just throwing ideas out.
I don’t know what to say about that. Math is a construct with which one can do lots of things; some may be relevant to reality and others are out there.
Determinism is a series of falling dominoes through time. With enough information, we should be able to predict everything that is determined. In fact, the Galton Machine is not random because every ball is going where it was determined to go. In other words, it didn’t fall there by chance, but by certainty.
The Galton machine is a good analogy of the wave function of reality: we can never know the location of one very small particle with certainty, but due to the central limit, we can predict precisely what a large-enough collection of particles will do. Each ball is a very large number of particles, so that makes the Galton machine determined by Newtonian Mechanics… each ball is going to the place that the central limit of quantum possibilities is telling it to go. In reality, the balls crash into things causing atoms to fly everywhere, so some particles fell outside the central limit, but not very many, relatively.
I see it opposite. With the word “fire”, the reality is behind the word and not the word. Alan Watts said, “You can’t cut cheese with lines of longitude.”
People hijack words all the time. That’s why there are so many definitions to words (1. 2. 3. adj, noun, verb). Bob could be a noun or verb… maybe even an adjective. English language is gay
That makes sense. So if we are conscious, it doesn’t follow that the flower necessarily is, but if the flower is necessarily not, then it necessarily means we are not. And if we are not, then there is no such thing as consciousness. So if we want to believe in consciousness, it seems like the flower would have to have some sort of consciousness.
An alternative is to assume we have a spirit that exists outside or independent of this universe, yada yada. That way the flower can be mechanical and we have consciousness by virtue of the unknown thing called spirit.
Another alternative is to believe that bio-mechanics isn’t mechanical. It may follow quantum mechanics instead and maybe there is some quantum mechanical difference between humans and flowers. Lots of decisions. But if we’re going to take a real hardline materialistic approach, then the first assumption applies.
Don Henley talked of “men without souls” in the song “Garden of Allah”
It was a pretty big year for predators
The marketplace was on a roll
And the land of opportunity
Spawned a whole new breed of men without souls
This year, notoriety got all confused with fame
And the devil is downhearted
Because there’s nothing left for him to claim
Your idea of lacking consciousness reminded me of the references to men lacking souls.
Yeah, that’s another point Alan Watts covered back in the 20th century… are you breathing or is it ‘happening’ to you?
That’s deep! Bruce Lee said we learn to forget so it becomes a part of us. Alan says we have to act before we decide to act and the only way that’s possible is to realize, through futility, that the illusion of you doesn’t exist.
Maybe the fall of man was becoming conscious of ourselves. We knew just a bit too much. Now, we have to know everything to get back where we started.
That’s insightful. The only thing I could add is that self-consciousness could be a thought among thoughts and itself be a construct and not have existence even now.
How does that go…
There was a young man who said though
I know that I know that I know,
But what I’d like to see is the I that sees me
When I know that I know that I know.
You can’t see yourself and if you try, you just identify with a progressively higher level of consciousness.
You say it’s not the complexity, but how that complexity functions? Ok, I guess I can agree with that because there are 2 possibilities: the complexity is an array of switches with on/off and the complexity is an array of switches with many other results that can never be determined with certainty. So it isn’t the complexity at all, but the randomness.
I can’t imagine having any awareness of myself if I were the result of a series of determinant switches. I could be more analog than digital. Why would I need awareness of myself if I’m fully determined? There would be no point.
The flower can sense when other flowers have been attacked by insects, so it can probably sense the sun as well. I’ve even read where plants do math. Grass has to compute the amount of sugar to hold overnight to last just until morning. If it holds less sugar, it will die. If it holds more sugar, it won’t use enough sugar to grow as fast as other grass that is better at math, so it will be selected out. The grass that is best at math, survives.
I disagree; there is a difference between consciousness and perception. A flower is not in what we’ve talked about revealed as conscious, but it is clear that if we can unconsciously perceive things, which humans demonstrably do all the time, then perception is something more fundamental. It is the requirement of responsiveness. Consciousness is sometimes also the case, and indeed it rather impedes perception than that it allows for it.
A robot can perceive, can it not? Would we call a robot conscious?
I don’t think so.
Consciousness has to do with intent.
the is where the self, the perspective forms. When there is an image in the mind of what is not but must be.
Consciousness is thus inherently tied to ethics.
These are some separate statements, its just to point you to my general direction of thought. Ive learned that this is not a way of thinking people easily adapt to.
Yeah, blah.
Spirit means all sorts of things, I prefer to see it as the exact now, the present, and the human art here is to keep all potential uncollapsed, a readiness for each minute stretch of the eternal moment. A zen tranquility is panther-like. All this is “spirit” to me - which is why I don’t tend to speak of it. It makes no sense in words.
On top of that, there is a pretty solid biological difference between us and flowers. We have brains, flowers don’t, such matters can shed light on this riddle.
Seriously, the brain is such a ridiculously finely tuned electrochemical object that it makes far more sense to me that all kinds of magic are very real, than that we would live in a clunky Newtonean things bumping into each other kind of world.
Words are much closer to how h universe works than billiard balls.
The universe is far stranger than we dare to admit.
Ive watched a part, I disagree with what he says about unconscious decisions.
Yep.
Me too.
In yoga, we are the breathing or when we breathe well enough, we are.
I see breathing as valuing. In this sense:
Air is an essential value
because without it, we die.
We would price it infinitely high.
The way we appreciate, interpret, take in, process the value is by breathing.
I go so fr as the call the breathing itself valuing.
I don’t care much for the conscious thing on top of it - it is arbitrary compared to the breathing, to the elemental valuing and values.
I simply do this to radicalize language in a direction so that it isn’t such a spineless hedgehog but a leopard that takes us somewhere.
Valuing is the dense concept in our language. It is closest to us.
Being is a verb for good reason.
Martial art is a good way of being in the exact now. It is thus in my terms spiritual.
What you have to realize is the everyone wants the same things, but in different ways,
Not all people want is the same as others but most of it is.
Values - common goods -
even cross moralities, these values stand
this is why wars, etc -
internet is just war continued by more enlightened means.
Its awesome. In the past we would have lethe not known or killed each other. Now we are forced to jest, probe and reason.
Valuing and pricing are two distinct concepts. In fact the stock market consists of these two phases.
Valuing is the establishment of the practical, fundamentals worth of the company (all the assets, technologies, workers, prospects, everything that it is), pricing is the establishment of what one thinks one can get others to pay for it - how those that do not know the value might estimate it.
Our values are the strings on which our life is played.
Philosophers rewrite dictionaries all the time. That’s an important function of philosophy. I’m not sure any education system has it wrong. I think formal education has its purposes, which may not be the same as all the purposes a philosopher may have for language. Another function of philosophy is to suggest purposes for education. And for words. The philosopher may desire more nuance than ordinary language provides. Or less.
The problem is semantics. The definitions are too lose and consciousness, perception, and awareness can all be interchanged. We can’t communicate in this environment.
How about this:
Perception - the interception of information traveling trough spacetime. Awareness - the perception of perception - the perception of information as being information. Consciousness - the perception of awareness - the perception of information as being information as being known by someone.
Now what is the perception of consciousness? Ego? And what is the perception of ego? Enlightenment? Can we go higher?
So, flowers perceive sunlight because they are in the path of the EMR. Flowers are aware of the sunlight because they perceive the sunlight as information which is evidenced by the fact that they act accordingly. Flowers are probably not perceiving the fact that they are aware of sunlight, but who can say for sure?
Perception is the interception of information and then the fact that the intercepted information is indeed information is then intercepted and that becomes awareness. The interception of the information of the fact that the 2nd order information is indeed being intercepted is consciousness.
No, I would not. Therefore, mechanical newtonian processes (bio or otherwise) are probably not responsible for consciousness. A robot is simply a dumb machine; a flower is not.
Psychopaths are unconscious?
I’ll accept that in the spirit of fairness
Strange but sensible.
What did he say?
If you’re sleepwalking, are you conscious?
If it helps you to conceptualize, then I support your use of the word valuing. Just realize that when you try to convey ideas to me, I will have to struggle to interpret what you mean because I spent a lifetime defining value in another way.
Yes, they want to inflate their ego. What I’ve found is that people will form a gut-shot opinion and then spend the rest of their lives defending their stance because being wrong is never an option. I hate that Stefan Molyneux is so heavily invested in anarchism because if evidence ever came to light that he is wrong, it would be impossible for him to admit it. It’s better not to be married to ideas and to admit we are wrong quickly before it gets progressively harder and harder.
Perhaps I should have written “custom” instead of “habit”, as there need be no force of habit involved. Anyway:
::
But what does true randomness necessarily mean? I went on to answer this question.
I can agree with all of this.
By “the world of appearance or fiction”, he does not just mean the world of words. Your whole conception of fire is an appearance or fiction, an interpretation.
Consciousness is a recognition/realization/identifying (of an environment) - “Were you conscious of your situation?”
An awareness is merely an acknowledgement (of an environment) - "Yes. I was aware of that".
A perception is an interpretation (of an environment) = “… as perceived from my perspective”.
They each require a degree of the others.
“I perceived that there was anger and was aware that trouble was underfoot. But I wasn’t fully conscious of the significance.”
The idea is that if you could know everything, life would be exceedingly boring so the purpose of randomness is for a surprise. A determined universe would be pointless.
If yang could ever overtake yen, then both would cease to exist. The idea is for good to always be winning, but never win. Bad is supposed to be losing, but never lose. Once you achieve totality, there is no point to existing. Life is the journey and not the destination. Randomness and surprise is what guarantees our existence.
Don’t ask for the mechanism because I don’t know. I just suspect randomness to have something to do with it. I can’t imagine having awareness of myself if I were the result of a newtonian mechanical determinant process. Randomness is key… somehow.
Perhaps it is merely that you cannot perceive the distinction and thus cannot be aware that there is a distinction because your consciousness presumes too much.
Dogs can’t perceive of and thus be aware of color either. They are not conscious of the idea that any such distinction exists. Trying to tell the dog differently wouldn’t help. So speak however you like.
