The chemical-mechanical reaction on one side of the plant are different than on the other side - due to the Sunshine. That inherently causes the flower to bend toward the Sun. There is no “awareness of the Sun” other than one side getting warmer and more light while the other side did not. The flower mechanically (due to chemical responses) bends toward the Sunshine. It did not have to be the actual Sun. Anything with the right amount of the right type of light will (and often does) create the same response. And that exact same response can be created from scratch with man-made photo-sensitive cells. There is no magic to it, and no consciousness involved. Plants are complex mechanisms. That is all they are.
Merely by a complex bio-mechanical reaction, evolved to be what you currently see. Science certainly is not wrong about EVERYthing.
Perhaps the mistake you are making is the assumption that the universe works, or must work, according to rules. In other words, that the universe is one giant pattern – an eternally repeating sequence of events. This means that there must be a “why?” behind every event. But what if there isn’t?
How does thinking work? Do we start with an unproven premise and then seek evidence for it or do we start with what is evident (our observations) and then make conclusions (which is to say assumptions) based on it?
We are attracted to patterns. Does that mean everything is a pattern?
We are attracted to patterns because patterns allow us to predict the future.
We don’t like their absence because that makes it difficult for us to predict the future.
Life, and everything within the universe, can go on without the ability to predict.
Intelligence is just a tool that allows us to predict the future so that we can better prepare for it.
Intelligence is useful only to the extent that it works with what is real, which is to say, with our observations.
Its goal is to recognize patterns within the observed – if there are any.
It becomes degenerate when it starts substituting what is real (observations) with what isn’t (imaginations) in order to create the appearance of patterns so that we can pretend that we can predict the future and prepare for it in order to avoid negative consequences.
Then it becomes merely about comfort.
It’s difficult to define the concept of perception in terms of information philosophy.
It’s easier to define the concept of reaction.
Reaction is a word denoting any event that appears regularly after some other event.
For example, light bulb emitting light is a reaction to a light switch being pressed.
Perception is a form of reaction, that is true, but it is a specific type of reaction, which means that not every reaction is a form of perception, that is sufficiently complex to make it difficult for us to describe it in exact terms.
Right… it’s a dumb mechanical process. So what about the last bit of my post? How are we any different? Isn’t then perception an illusion? I don’t think we can have our cake and eat it too because if the flower has no perception, then perception doesn’t exist and it’s just a construct of our imagination. That is, unless you see yourself as distinct from the universe as an outside observer, but I’m not guessing that you do.
If you are constrained by this universe and do not exist on the outside, then you are just another “bio-mechanical” process chugging along and therefore there is no perception; only reaction. There is no philosophy; just bio-processes heading along their determined paths. Everything we experience is an illusion somehow generated by the determinate process.
But, I’m not sure I could agree with determinism because randomness does exist.
It took a while, but hidden variable theory was eventually disproved by John Bell, who showed that there are lots of experiments that cannot have unmeasured results. Thus the results cannot be determined ahead of time, so there are no hidden variables, and the results are truly random. That is, if it is physically and mathematically impossible to predict the results, then the results are truly, fundamentally random.askamathematician.com/2009/1 … andomness/
Therefore, not everything is a determined process that could be rewound and replayed with the same outcome. If we start the big bang over with the same initial conditions, we will get a different result. If we start it over and over sufficient times, we may get an approach to a central limit so that one outcome is more likely than another, but that is far from being determined.
IMO, I think being alive entails some degree of randomness and inherent unpredictability. So although the flower is following its bio-mechanical processes to track the sun, it isn’t quite so mechanical as to be determined and perfectly predictable… and that is what we call life. And that means computers, as we understand them to be as of now which are nothing more than an array of switches, will never be alive no matter how powerful they become. They will never be conscious. So if computers aren’t conscious because they are perfectly predictable, then we have to wonder what the antithesis is to that. Is all life conscious??? So it would seem.
What would be the point of existence if everything could be known? If determinism is true and we’re just flowing along a stream through time, how could we be aware of it? And if we are, then why is a flower not? Determinism has always been unsettling to me.
That’s one heck of a tangent, but it was fun. Talk to you guys tomorrow!
The difference is not merely the degree of complexity involved, but specifically how that complexity allows a mammal to reconstruct an internal image of the outside environment (much like a person inside a van watching the outside through cameras). The mammal’s “perception” (his camera’s image) is not 100% accurate, but it is close enough for him to function. The flower has no such bio-mechanism at all. The flower cannot form an internal image of the Sun such as to think to itself, “there it is”. Bio-mechanical mechanisms with the capacity to “remotely recognize” objects, are what people have always called “conscious” (aware of the objects surrounding them). That is the difference. A flower could never tell that a bee was buzzing near until the bee actually landed on the flower. And even then, the flower has no comprehension of what a bee is or looks like. The flower merely gives what is taken and takes what is given until it can do so no longer.
That is the difference.
Randomness in the sense of unpredictability, is merely a measure of awareness and information. To the flower, all is random, totally unpredictable.
Perception requires consciousness.
Otherwise we wouldn’t have to talk about perception but merely about interactivity of matter.
To equate perception with merely interactivity is a materialistic worldview.
Life, to be alive is not merely being matter, it distinguishes itself. One aspect of it in physical terms is its different behaviour in entropic terms. Life is resisting the increase of entropy, Non-alive matter is not. Or in other words, life is ordering, so a decrease of the level of entropy.
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.
