The last few posts have touched on a certain definition of consciousness as the having of knowledge. I want to challenge this a little–or rather, I want to propose that consciousness is bit more complex than that: I want to propose that consciousness qua knowledge is one kind of consciousness. It depends on the organism having the ability for cogitation. But the fetus, the zygote, doesn’t come fully equipped with cogitation from the get go. As soon as it develops the first semblances of a nervous system, I would think the first kind of experience it would be capable of having would be some kind of rudimentary sensation. But unless it already has consciousness in order to experience this sensation (in order for it to be sensation), I’m hard pressed to understand how it could develop and evolve into thought and knowledge.
I’ve found it useful, therefore, to distinguish between what I call epistemic consciousness and experiential consciousness. Any organism first has experiential consciousness (the ability to feel something–anything) before it develops epistemic consciousness. And before it has epistemic consciousness, it is capable of experiencing things without knowing it is having those experiences.
Consciousness sure is prodigious. Wow, what a vast area it is, and, boy, what great amounts of experiences it can contain! That’s one way of looking at it. Another is to ask how we become conscious of something. Anon asked somewhere if a sense of self is a necessary aspect of consciousness? I’d say that is a necessity for one to be conscious of what surrounds him. If we get into analogies, sensory activity is conveyance of electrical nerve signals from the area of detection to the brain much like transferring info from one disc to another. Liz talked about translation and interpretation of said info by means of memory cell activation (frames of knowledge) simultaneous with the sensory detection – and that has to be factored in when discussing the act of being conscious.
When Liz speaks of the strengthening of the knowledge (you have of the experience) due to the repetition of the experience, I believe she is referring to that which reinforces an experiencing structure in you. The immediate translation of a sensory input by means of that experiencing structure is what thought is made up of … and isn’t what you know and think about consciousness … is it not that that is just what you will experience of consciousness so far?
We’re talking about consciousness on more than one level of abstraction, here.
obe, what do you mean by ‘singular consciousness?’ If you mean an individual consciousness comes equipped with a sort of Jungian ‘collective conscious’ or the imprint of prior consciousnesses, I agree insofar as those ‘imprints’ are part of the human brain.
anon, can you describe anything in English without your description being linear? Try it. Describe ‘popcorn’, for example.
Other people have replied to what I’ve posted in this thread. This makes it a ‘shared’ topic going beyond you and me. In the process, some of our agreed to points are being covered over.
None of us has the means necessary to define consciousness. Is that agreed? The best any of us can do is try to explain how we think consciousness is arrived at in a human mind/brain. I’ve said that I believe it is concomitant–or concurrent–with the development of sensory reaction. Sensory reaction can’t happen without the development of the central nervous system and all its constituents. That development is physical and doesn’t yet include cognition.
Consciousness involves repetition and memory of the reaction to outside stimuli. This is, to me, the basis for knowledge–an essential part of consciousness. Cognition and self-awareness come later. If cognition and self-awareness are traits necessary for humanity, a new-born human isn’t born with them, because a new-born is still in a stage of development that hasn’t yet reached that point.
If you guys want to debate that, then please do so.
When Neo was in his dream world created by the machine’s mechanisms, his senses were essentially defunct, yet he (or rather his brain) was ‘conscious’ of living a ‘real’ life. Hence, what is real are electrical signals interpreted by the brain in the areas that correspond with areas that the senses are interpreted or translated as the brain converts the impulses. The nerve endings on the retina, eardrum, taste buds, skin, etc., are there only to detect and are the starting point of a journey through the nerve pathways that must terminate in a functioning brain. The eye, ear, nose, etc., themselves do not ‘tell’ anything.
This sounds like a reference to instinct or intuition. Would you say this ‘collection’ of knowledge is passed down through the genes somehow? Also, do you think the brain is singularly capable of creating mental contents upon which it may speculate, or does it have to acquire, from outside sources, the knowledge in order to know about which it is conscious of?
gib, I guess it depends on what you call ‘knowledge’ and how you define ‘cognition.’ For me, knowledge is acquired through experience, and memory, of sensory input, while cognition is the ability to sort through one’s knowledge, arrange one’s knowledge, and–in so doing–learn even more.
Have you ever read Jean Piaget’s theories of the development of cognition in infants and children? He’s quite interesting and really laid the groundwork in that area of child psychology.
Anyway–I’m interested in hearing your ideas so as to add to my knowledge. That’s why I’m here.
I see uniqueness as manifesting itself in the way genes combine to produce the physical aspects of the members of a species. No two leaves on a tree are the same just as no two snowflakes are and no two humans are. We’re all individually unique in physical composition because there is no model in nature when it comes to individual members of a species. Nature may be trying to keep a species pure and strong in the gene pool, which mankind has weakened with humans because we find medical remedies to prolong the weak/sick humans and allow them to pass along a weaker strain of genes which probably weakens the gene pool through breeding. But that’s another story. Anyway, I’d go on to say, though, that we humans basically function the same way. All life is related to other life at the molecular level (DNA) and is linked anatomically, physiologically and biochemically. Due to this common chemical thread, all living systems are similar in their basic structure and function.
Now, when it comes to thought, I’d be the first to admit that I function in that aspect just like a machine. It’s no different from the extraordinary instrument we have, the computer. You press a button and it indicates it is ready. Then you ask for something, then it searches. That searching is thinking. But it is a mechanical process. In that computer there is no thinker. There is no thinker thinking there at all. If there is any information or anything that is referred to, the computer puts it together and throws it out. That is all that is happening. It is a very mechanical thing that is happening. We are not ready to accept that thought is mechanical because that knocks off the whole image that we are not just machines. It is an extraordinary machine. It is not different from the computers we use. But my body is something living; it’s got a living quality to it. It has a vitality. It is not just mechanically repeating; it carries with it the life energy like current energy.
Pardon me for cutting in Gib …. But isn’t the stimulus response activity one unitary movement that is not actually able to be experienced by a fetus? Doesn’t knowledge or thought (that’s acquired latter) have to come in between the stimulus and response mechanism in order to experience what is happening?
Do I “understand why kicking a ball results in it flying through the air?” Maybe and/or maybe not. I know that the kicker has exerted enough force on the ball to dislodge it from its state of rest for a given period of time before gravity takes over and ultimately returns the ball to its state of rest. If I don’t know the mechanics of that, that’s one thing; I do have, however, empirical ‘proof’ that that’s what’s going to happen.
As for the rest of your post, I don’t think physical explanations can be applied to everything in my mental world. I’d have to be a materialist to do so. Hey, anon, I’m on your side here, buddy. I’m just using my own words, is all.
No apology is needed, FM. However, I think I’ve answered this previously in my link, i.e., the fetus does show reactions to, and memory of, its stimulus/response mechanism.
To get a bit off topic here, because I found it so awesome I want to share it. I watched a very short film (a bit over a minute) the other night. It started with a dog asleep on the floor. Its legs started to twitch, then, as the dream progressed, it started running. It ran faster, looking back over its shoulder. Suddenly it stopped running, turned onto its back, and began fighting–teeth bared and biting, legs pushing upward. Then it stood up and started running again–right into a wall, which finally woke him up. It was one hell of a nightmare! But it showed primal fear.
This is what I thought you were talking about when you mentioned inborn memories. And yes, those memories are there. We all need them and so we all have them.
I only saw the first Matrix and I missed the beginning, so it was rather confusing to me. But, you’re correct, what is “real” to a materialist, are nothing other than electrical signals. What I’ve iterated–even stressed–is the difference between the mechanisms of the brain and the results of those mechanisms. How does the mind/brain actually transform those electrical signals into thought?
That, to me, is a phenomenon that can’t be explained by a materialist.
Liz, a quick glance at subsequent posts and I don’t think you’ve responded to this. I might be wrong about that. What do you think of this presentation? You can say that language limits us to linearity on some level, but it’s really not that hard express non-linearity. In some ways, it’s just about presenting a bit of complexity.
These distinctions make sense to me. Would you say that one state causes the next stage? Or do you think maybe there is an underlying situation, that causes this flowering, in stages, to occur? Or some other explanation, perhaps?
I’m not sure if I agree with the portion I bolded here or not. Perhaps if you clarify what you mean by a sense of self. But for the moment I think it’s safe to assume you’re just referring to awareness of consciousness - awareness of oneself as a conscious being. If so, then I think the important question is whether this is just semantics - i.e. I can choose to either define consciousness as including self awareness or not - or whether this is actually a fundamental difference - i.e. there is no connection between a thermostat and sentience, at all. In this second view, a thermostat shares no important characteristics with sentient life (or if you don’t believe the “lower” animals are conscious, then they share no important characteristics with the “higher” animals).
See my response to gib. Please understand, I’m still just trying to get some idea of what you believe regarding the relationship between consciousness and the senses.
What I meant by losing my sense of a shared topic, is that I’m losing my sense of what the salient points are. We’ve been talking about the senses, and about consciousness. I believe we’re exploring this because of an interest in the relationship between mind and body. If so, are you saying that the senses are physical, consciousness mental? Are you saying that one cause the other? Are you saying that they interact? Forgive me, sometimes I just don’t extract a person’s essential point the way I should. Maybe I would have less of a problem with this if I printed out our conversation so far and took it to a chair in a nice quiet corner somewhere and read through it like that. But I don’t do that.
Ok, sorry for going through your post so linearly, haha, but this seems like the kind of clarification I’ve been looking for. How far do you think all this develops, without any cognition at all? And what, then, causes cognition to arise?
How would you relate these assertions to the mind-body problem?
I follow the biologist Richard Lewontin’s characterization of biological organisms as “internally heterogeneous open systems”. I don’t think mind is blind to its own contents - there is no strict inside and outside. I do think genetic data is a form of mental content, and that like any data, this content can be experienced. Liz asked whether a person with no senses would be a blob or not - I’m not really sure what that means. I think a jellyfish experiences its world. I think Einstein experienced his world. I think a living person born without functioning senses would experience his world. We aren’t born from a vacuum, and we don’t return to a vacuum when we die. Our lives extend beyond what we think of as our selves. Genetic information is one example of this.
