Does that generalize to ordinary animals, or is it only the case for miraculous animals whom God tampers with?
Also, Goldilocks and the Three Bears teaches a completely different lesson. The talking animals have property rights which may not legally be infringed upon.
I guess if you have talking donkeys and talking snakes, it is a sign of consciousness. Of course, it’s also a common characteristic of fables and fairy tales.
I always assumed that in fable-like stories, animals were stand-ins for human traits and flaws. Of course, that would make the good book a collection of fable-like stories, which I am OK with.
Does a beaver dam count?
I adore Kipling’s “Jungle Books,” for instance, because he uses the animals as a way of exploring human morality. (And, also, it’s really well written!) So, yeah, pretty much.
(In the same way, science fiction “aliens” are mostly just stand-ins for humans, to help us try to highlight various moral inquiries by focusing on some specific ideas. Kzin are bellicose, Puppeteers are cowardly but very far-sighted, Kdatlyno are…actually I have no idea what Kdatlyno are…)
I honestly don’t know. It’s a more profound change in the environment than, say, a bird’s nest – and I hope we’d all agree that building a nest isn’t really “altering the environment.” On the other hand, it isn’t even close to putting tens of thousands of square miles of land under the plough.
Maybe we’re stuck with H. Beam Piper’s definition: only humans build fires and have spoken language.
(It’s times like this I most miss Diogenes the Cynic, for he would most certainly toss a plucked chicken over our wall at about this point.)
The problem is defying what the question actually is. "What is consciousness’’ is a badly formed question. There are many possibilities for what consciousness is from the simplest life forms which react constructively with their environment (phototropism, gravity sensors, homeostasis) through lower animals, higher animals, pre-literate humans and modern humans.
The ‘hard problem’ defined by Chalmers is ‘how can any physical organism possess Qualia’ -raw perception. That is difficult enough, but then we need to explain how such raw experience is manipulated to give modern human consciousness.
I incline towards a simple of emergence of Qualia in lower organisms as evolution fixing on a quirk of nature’s complexity that allows self reference and then multiplies this advantage over millions of generations in the same way that complex organs including the sense organs are evolved. I feel that proto-consciousness started with internal signals caused by chemical gradients such as early hormone or prostaglandin secretions resulting in some form of internal Qualia that we still experience as adrenaline rush or fast pain signals- as much somatic as psychological.
I also incline to the idea that modern human consciousness happens rather later than we assume-either as late as Homer and the early books of the Bible as Jaynes suggests, or as a multi millennial long process that creates modern consciousness via acculturation, education and rearing processes, making it more communal than corporeal.
As with many philosophical problems, it may be the case that Consciousness is eventually ‘explained away’ as some sort of natural emergent process as we have done with ‘life’, rather than ‘explained’. All scientific explanation from physics, chemistry and other fields never actually explains, merely pushing mysterious axiomatic objects of thought such as forces or strings or quarks further away from normality.
Many animals at all level manipulate their environment- bees, termites, bower birds, apes and so on. What sets human technology aside is its non-specificity and the application of habits to totally new ways of doing things. When I see beavers learning to build bricks and mix mortar to build a dam, I will give them full credit for advanced consciousness-without such a miracle, a beaver dam is no more impressive than a termite hill.
This is probably true; modern consciousness might have emerged in various isolated individuals or even small groups tens of thousands of years ago, but with no reliable way of recording it or passing it on to later generations, this momentary lucidity will soon have faded from history.
I think that perhaps the emergence of written language, no matter how crude, indicates the presence of some type of consciousness— the ability to reflect on what goes on in our lives and represent it symbolically for others of our species to understand. It’s a pretty remarkable feature that human beings have managed to develop in such high detail. Look at what you’re doing right now—reading and writing—and even inserting an emoticon to show your tone…that’s a pretty advanced and precise communication that allows others to get in your head for a few moments.
Agreed! It’s close to miraculous. It’s allowed us to develop intricate philosophy, incredibly ornate theology, and to cooperate in building an immense technical civilization. Shakespeare was on the button when he wrote, “What a piece of work is a man.”
(Also, of course, we’re murderous, raping, nasty, corrupt, filthy, greedy little monkeys. Michael Shaara is right: we’re angels…but we’re killer angels.)
In imagination, we can look back to the first hominid or hominin who looked out at a herd of antelope, and then started putting pebbles on the ground in front of him, in the world’s first one-to-one correspondence.
If he could see the world of today…would he repent of his discovery?
That is essentially Julian Jaynes take on the matter. He suggests that until the second millennium BCE humans were closer to automata following internal commands which were perceived as orders to act from their god. Only with the extra recording and reflecting over the generations did modern full consciousness appear. This does not mean that before that people were not aware, just that the assumption of personal control and responsibility for actions bad not developed.
Sometimes I wonder what our meta cognition would look or sound like if we didn’t have language skills to express our thoughts. That voice in my head is really just conscious me trying to explain to myself what unconscious me is feeling.
The latest Scientific American has an article on “Willpower.” Not “will” exactly, but just rather ordinary will-power. Overcoming addiction, facing obstacles, discipline, self-control, etc.
It isn’t directly related to the question of consciousness, but it does have some sideways relevance.
Jaynes’ “bicameral brain”, rather than applying to all before, roughly, the Iron Age, was specific to humans with language and with the social and religious structures associated with urban life that led to ancestor worship, etc. I think Jaynes is vague on consciousness mode before those developments.
Am I the same person I was a year and a half ago, whence I last posted here? My cells recycle themselves every so many months, and I certainly FEEL a continuity. Does that mean my consciousness is not the same as that which makes up my physical body?
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Your consciousness is part of your physical body, the same way the music is part of the CD its recorded on. Break the CD, no more music.
You might as well try to ask if the candle’s flame is “not the same” as the candle, wax, wick, and heat that compose it. Of course it is the same. When the candle goes out, no one wonders if it has “gone on” to some candle afterlife. It’s gone, is all.
Continuity of consciousness is not perfect. You’ve probably forgotten things in the last decade or two. Maybe lots of things. (Worse, you – like all of us! – probably have a few “false memories,” where you were sure that movie starred Robert Mitchum, but it was actually Cary Grant.)
Part of living a good life is to try to improve over time, as well as fight off the degradation of aging.
I like the candle analogy, because it provides a little more insight. Sure, this PARTICULAR candle may have gone out, but the concept of fire is still alive and well. It’s like asking if the electricity that comes from the outlet in my house is the same electricity that comes from an outlet in your house. Or on another continent. Or on the space station or even another planet. Do you see where I’m going with this? I have a hunch this is how consciousness works.
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Nope. Platonic absolute, perhaps? Honestly, no: I don’t have any idea what you’re trying to convey.
Split brain behavior experiments
3:32-4:31 “What we have with Joe is a dramatic example of a neurological case that really allows you this window into the nonconscious, and how powerful nonconscious processes are at influencing our conscious self, our personal self. What Joe, and patients like him -and there are many of them- teaches us is that the mind is made up of a constellation of independent, semi-independent, agents. And that these agents, these processes can carry on a vast number of activities outside of our conscious awareness. Even though that goes on there is some final stage, some final system, that I happen to think is in the left hemisphere, that pulls this all of this information together into a theory. It has to generate a theory to explain all of this, all of these independent elements… and that theory becomes our particular theory of our self and of the world
Kurgesagt’s followup “what are you?”
3:43-4:18 “What makes one of your cells you anyway? Maybe the information contained in it, your DNA. Until recently it was believed that all the cells in your body had basically the same genetic code, but it turns out this is wrong. Your genome is mobile, changing over time through mutations and environmental influences, this is especially the case in your brain. According to recent discoveries, a single neuron in an adult brain has more than 1000 mutations in its genetic code that are not present in the cells surrounding it.”4:35-5:55 “Consciousness consists of all those states of feeling, or sentience, or awareness. It begins in the morning when you wake up from a dream of a sleep, and it goes on all day ‘till you fall asleep, or die, or otherwise become unconscious. Dreams are a form of consciousness…the famous mind body problem… has a simple solution too…all of our conscious states, without exception, are caused by lower level neuro-biological processes in the brain. And they are realized in the brain as higher level -or system- features. Its about as mysterious as the liquidity of water. Right? The liquidity is not extra juice squirted out by the H2O molecules, its a condition that the system is in. And just as the jar full of water can go from liquid to solid, depending upon the behavior of the molecules, so your brain can go from a state of being conscious to a state of being unconscious depending on the behavior of the molecules.”
What I’m suggesting is that I think consciousness is consciousness, in the same way fire is fire, water is water, electricity is electricity, and magnetism is magnetism. We experience the illusion of separateness when it comes to consciousness, but ultimately we are all part of one and the same consciousness. The internet would be the closest analogy I can think of at the moment: it is a repository for the collective thoughts, musings, emotions, wisdom and whatnot of mankind, and we all contribute to it in our own small way. It’s like the Borg collective, but with a sense of humour. I suspect that the consciousness that is you is the same consciousness that is me. It is not two separate consciousnesses. That is why we are able to communicate; we find a similar wave length and then riff on that for a while.
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