What Is Consciousness?

Great Debates
1

This topic was just getting good in another thread when it was unfortunately shut down, so I am starting a new thread.

What exactly does it mean to be conscious? Unconscious? Semi-conscious? Do animals have consciousness? At what point do humans became conscious? Was early man conscious and how might that have come about? How can I prove that I am conscious? These kinds of questions I would like to learn more about.

I am looking for respectful discussion of ideas here and it’s fine if there are different concepts of what consciousness means. Not looking for only one definitive answer. No insults and no trolls please. Thank you.

2

Well, I kind of can go along with Mickiel’s idea that language plays a role in one aspect of what we call conciousness or self-awareness.
Namely the inner dialogues we constantly have in our heads. Phrasing stuff.

Without them, like in those short zen-like moments, or when you suddenly realise you’ve been driving your car on auto-pilot, there does seem to be a sort of non-consiousness.

3

Consciousness is awareness, first of all.

It can’t be directly measured; externally, only behavior (whether of individual organisms or of chemicals and cellular structures and what-have-you) and, from behavior, consciousness can only be concluded provisionally. Generally what we mean when we inpute consciousness to someone or something on the basis of behavior is that we are attributing intent to the behavior, we are saying that the behavior itself is “conscious behavior”, that the explanation for the behavior lies with the ideas and thoughts and beliefs and intentions of a conscious actor.

And therein lies a problem: all such behaviors can also be explained as deterministic responses to stimuli without any reference to consciousness. So does it exist?

Well, mine does. I can’t assess yours for all the reasons I just discussed, but as I said, consciousness is awareness and I’m actually experiencing mine.

It can’t be an illusion. Without consciousness there is no one there to experience the illusion; an illusion has to be an illusion to someone (or something) and hence even if the notions of reality that I entertain are themselves chock-full of illusions and misconceptions and whatnot, the consciousness itself is quite real. I can’t prove to myself that you’re also conscious, just as you have to take it on faith that I am, but here we are at Descarte’s famous “I think, therefore I am” insight.

Now, to me, this existence of my consciousness tosses a conceptual spanner-wrench into the notion of determinism, at least of radical determinism (the notion that the only explanation of any and all behavior is one of deterministic response). My non-illusory consciousness is the (or at least “a”) reason for my behavior. In my model of reality, yours is an explanation for your behavior, too and I act on that assumption. Whether you choose to label that perspective “free will” or give it some other name, it is a different perspective than a radical determnism that refuses to explain any behavior as a consequence of intent.

4

As an addendum to my post above;
That isn’t the whole story though, cause there is also that brief moment before you start putting things into words, the thought itself, the idea in its pure form.

5

What consciousness is is a hot topic of debate and research.

Uncounsciousness is when the various areas of the brain are working, but they aren’t interacting with each other.

Self-consciousness, or an awareness of self has been tested in animals by surrepitously daubing paint on their foreheads and then leading them to a mirror. If they see the animal with the spot on the forehead and immediately touch the same spot on their own foreheads, it’s a sign that they know that’s their reflection and, by extension, that they are aware of themselves as individuals.

Elephants are self-aware. There’s a list of other animals that have passed the test, but elephants are all I remember off hand.

It’s possible to have consciousness without self-consciousness and it’s possible to have self-consiousness without figuring out the mirror trick.

6

Connotatively, I want the word to mean a little more than just awareness.

(Is a sunflower aware of the direction of the sun?)

Consciousness, among other things, means a constant and extrapolative modeling of the surrounding environment. An insect might see the rock in front of it, but a conscious mind is wondering, “Yeah, but what’s hiding behind it?” An insect is only aware of the present, but a conscious mind is projecting possible futures. “If I do this, what will the consequences be?”

A conscious mind is aware, not only of the environment as it is perceived, but beyond perception.

An insect can only respond to its environment, but a conscious mind can alter its environment; it can cause things to happen as an act of volition.

(Uh-oh: “Free Will” raises its skeletal grinning visage!)

7

I think you aren’t giving the subconscious mind enough credit. Damon Knight had a book on writing in which he recommended giving plotting problems to your subconscious mind - which he called Fred. My subconscious can write programs and is very good at doing anagrams. And my old border collie mix, who wasn’t conscious, could plan, knew that streets on which he had never walked would take him to a park he liked to visit, and could abstract ideas. When he was a puppy we taught him to sit at street corners before we crossed. He abstracted this to sitting in the middle of the street to tell us that he wanted to cross.
The subconscious doesn’t have a monitor like the conscious mind has. It is just as smart as the conscious mind if not smarter.

8

Interesting responses. I think that awareness is part of the equation, but I think we also posses consciousness before we acquire language, so the internal dialogue can only be part of the answer. I read something once by Eckhart Tolle that suggests that when I say “my hand” or “my face” or even “my mind,” I am actually referencing another entity that is the me in “my.” Some might call that consciousness; some might call it the soul. Either way, it’s pretty interesting stuff.

9

A thing is concious if it is aware of its own existence as a being seperate from the universe at large. You can tell if a thing is concious if it can express its awareness somehow in a manner you can understand.

10

I’m just going to reiterate my recommendation for “I Am A Strange Loop” by Douglas Hofstadter, of “Goedel, Escher, Bach” and “Metamagical Themas” fame. He spends an entire book trying to answer this question.

11

You’re asking broad questions about dense topics with many different schools of thought.

Check out animal consciousness, the problem of other minds, and the philosophy of mind.

Consciousness is not a binary yes/no proposition, as anyone who’s been drunk, put under anesthesia, taken a psychedelic drug like mushrooms or done deep meditation can attest. Check out depersonalization. Or ego death.

Consciousness has different properties (e.g. subjectiveness, self awareness, metacognition or executive control) and some of these are found in animals to lesser extents. It’s a gradation.

For example, rhesus monkeys fail the mirror test but pass metacognition experiments. They know what they might not know, they are aware of their own thoughts and how they affect the outside world. Basically self agency, or they think about their thinking.

So far it’s not controversial to state many mammals and some birds are self aware. Most mammals probably have varying degrees of subjective experiences. You’ll get controversies about reptiles and the rest. Or octopi, which can solve puzzles, use tools, and have been observed engaging in play like behavior (AFAIK only mammals show fun seeking behavior, so that’s pretty crazy). But is there a subjective “what it’s like” to be an octopus? Or whether fish feel pain or if they do how much it’s like ours, still controversial.

Arthropods probably aren’t conscious, they seem to be like automatons running programs. Sometimes the rules are such simple if–>then statements that you can fuck with them in hilarious ways and trap them in a loop. But who knows? Maybe there’s a “what it’s like” experience to be a praying mantis.

So yeah, I’d say ancient humans and their ancestors were conscious. But not as much as us. But more than a cow. Maybe we’ll be even more conscious in the future.

12

Kind of makes you wonder what consciousness will be like in the future, when people look at us and wonder what we were thinking. Maybe a global consciousness will emerge, when we will wonder why we waste so much water trying to get oil out of the ground, for example. It certainly is cool having discussions with intelligent people.

13

Okay, that’s a darn good point, and I’ll have to ponder it a while. (While doing something else, as Knight might suggest. I’ll “think it over” unconsciously.)

I class dogs as having consciousness; you’ve just given an excellent example of why.

14

And it should be noted that the language issue might not be as cut-and-dried as people who are emotionally invested in the ultimate Truth of certain texts might prefer.

15

I consider most animals to be conscious at some level. We just understand mammals easily since we are mammals. Other animals likely have consciousness, just not in a way we are familiar with. For instance, as **kaylasdad99 **points out:

animals have language. Most animals that are highly social have varying degrees of language. Ants, Bees, Termites and the like use complex chemical signals. Wolves use vocal utterances. Birds have sounds, dances, and home building for communication.

I heard a long time ago (though I admit I don’t follow the science in this area closely) that the more social an animal is, the more types of communication they have as well as a higher variety in how they use that communication.

So, while we might not consider an ant “conscious” because it does something like fail the mirror test, it could be and we’d see it if we could communicate on their level, like with a mirror that has chemicals excreted from it.

16

I would exclude an ant from any definition of consciousness.

I’m not so dogmatic about the entire ant nest. :eek:

17

I’d go with self awareness. A being that is self aware, i.e. aware of itself as a separate, segregate being…that’s conscious.

As to when early man became conscious, I’d say that the only physical evidence we have is in tool use. At a certain point, the tools man (and related species) used became more focused and refined…and duplicated. I believe that is pretty good evidence of consciousness. Certainly by the time you started to see cave art and ornamental/decorative carvings and adornments you have solid evidence of consciousness…IMHO of course.

18

Then consider this:

:eek:

19

Consciousness is a topic I have interest in. At it’s most basic level, it’s just awareness, but in looking at all the different ways it manifests, I see it mostly as an emergent property that arises from various degrees of awareness. As such, I don’t think it makes sense to say a person is conscious, a tree isn’t, so there must be some hard line where a lifeform on one side is conscious and one on the other side is not. It’s not all the different from asking a question like “who was the first human?” We can say we’re human, and we can say that our ancestors at a point in the past are not, but we can’t just say some person was the first human and his parents were not.

Similarly, we can all agree that humans are conscious, but we also clearly see being asleep as unconscious. One of the aspects of sleep I find most fascinating is that, like as above, there doesn’t seem to be a clear line of awake and asleep. In general, one slowly loses awareness, but perhaps if something interesting comes up during that process, I seem to have an awareness that I was in that process when I received that stimulus, and then suddenly remember things that I probably wouldn’t have if that process had continued.

And our growth and maturation are not unlike that, except in reverse. We all have pretty solid ability to make decisions and remember things clearly at a certain age, and it gets progressively hazier younger and younger. We all may have earliest memories, but chances are they’re less distinct than later memories, our brains’ connections and ability to manifest consciousness gets more and more complex as we age.

So, in this regard, I think it’s quite fair to say that pretty much any form of life with brains, and possibly even some without them, could be described as conscious, it’s just a matter of what that degree of consciousness is. I think few would dispute that a chimp is conscious, but to a less degree than humans, dogs less so, etc. But even still, there’s different ways of being aware, so I don’t even think we can reasonably look at it as a continuum. For instance, there’s awareness of one’s surroundings, there’s self-awareness, there’s an ability to interact with one’s surroundings and communicate, etc.

Ultimately, though, unfortunately these are rather vague questions being posed by the OP, and consciousness is such a broad topic with varied opinions and different types of research, that all you’re really going to get are fairly vague responses.

20

The nexus of a whole bunch of feedback control loops centered on the brain.