sentient ocean or ??

I know they both might - I’m yet again asking what you believe. You said the ant was an example of conscious memory retrieval - is the camera also, in your opinion?

Out of interest, if I said I wasn’t conscious, how would you convince me otherwise?

I understand that he, like me, has reservations about how absolute one can be in saying that something is reduced. Can we really say that life is “reducible” to cells, given the large holes in our understanding of chemical biology, or even of reducing molecules to atoms? Similarly, our reduction of the process called consciousness to biological computational elements cannot by any means be said to be complete. If this introduces a dualism, so be it, but again I would argue that such dualisms are thus introduced throughout all fields of science like a host of Greek Gods, rendering Ockham’s Razor blunt and useless. Calling rocks “conscious” is still as silly as calling them “alive” or “computers”.

I don’t have a position on that.

I wouldn’t. You sure picked a weird username, in that case.

His adopting dualism is not predicated on the current status of reductionism, but on the conviction that qualia can’t be reduced.

Mr Dibble, that is the best reply yet, exactly what I was interested in, the idea of the mantle using evolution to eventually bring materials back to the planet is very intriguing.