# What Is Consciousness? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 20, 2014, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013 "2014-08-20T16:49:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2014, 6:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/41 "2014-08-22T06:58:48Z")
> [@eschereal](#): > > I got the impression that **Crane** was referring to autonomous automobiles, like those StreetView cars. Such vehicles do not have to do any adaptive learning, only responsive calculation. For that, a single consistent collection of interwoven algorithms is all you need, for every car. All they need is the GPS itinerary to go where they need to go, everything else is merely dealing with whatever crops up. They are still quite primitive. I can certainly that a car, after going through a construction zone for a day or two, could learn the zone, and slow down before it and not be surprised. Ditto for times and places where you can expect to have to stop for a traffic jam. It would be more responsive than starting fresh each trip. > [@](#): > > There are two things to consider here. The first is that the gigo of a complex process structure can be greatly affected by the gi, much of which will be in specific .dat/.plist sources (categorized memories). What I mean is that the result of a process can just as easily be altered by the reference data it draws from as by altering the actual coding. I submit that this accounts for a great deal of the diversity in observed human behavior – and some animal behaviors as well. Practically speaking it is easier for us to keep track of what we are doing if we put the learning in a table instead of in the code. But the situations are basically equivalent. > [@](#): > > The second thing is that I thnk we can be fairly confident that serial instruction processing is only weakly analogous to how our brains work. There is a great deal to learn about the structures and mechanisms that give rise to our behavior. The manner n which we learn things suggests to me no “self-modifying code” in the classical sense but something more like embedded-function instantiation that amounts to not so much modification of existing code as creation of new code. Data and code fit together in ways we have yet to suss out. The computational paradigm isn’t important either for thinking about this - for implementing it, yes. And except in the most trivial of cases self-modifying code does imply new code. I actually do this in a sense. I need to fetch data from a remote site, and only the new data. What I do is to create an expect script containing the sftp commands required to fetch the files that are new from the last time I ran, and then execute that script to sftp the files. It is a trivial example, but the ability to change this code is crucial. It is an obvious solution to an old compiler writer. ---
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2014, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/42 "2014-08-22T21:33:39Z")
So I’m having a conversation with my daughter about our cat an consciousness. Both of us feel pretty certain that she has it just based on her perceptiveness. She also has some sense of future because she somehow calculates exactly how much effort it will take to get up in the ledge without going over the other side. She also has some sense of past, even if it is just operant conditioning, because she remembers where the food is hidden and meows for it. But it got me to thinking; is temporal awareness (that which we call time) an exclusively human construct? I know that animals can’t tell time on a circular clock the way we do ( I also know many youngsters who can’t as well), but I also believe time is a mental construct that groups of humans have agreed upon. 2 o’clock has no meaning outside of humans. It does not exist outside of our frame of reference. Things happen. Planets revolve around suns. Planets rotate on their axis. These things are real, but we define them and give them names and measurable quantities. Perhaps an awareness of time, including time that predates or comes after our individual existence is a component of consciousness as well. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2014, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/43 "2014-08-22T22:25:45Z")
> [@Biffster](#): > > I can see a corollary with the Internet, one example of the collective consciousness of the human species. Take memes for example. They spread like wildfire and those who get them, get them, often sharing the same sarcastic sense of humor. We get it intuitively because we can relate to that mental state, that consciousness, that created the meme in the first place. Often the younger generation often recognizes memes or the humour therein quite readily while the older generation may not, thereby allowing the younger generation to have one up on the older generation. It is a kind of evolution designed for survival, not designed by anyone in particular (not even Steve Jobs) but rather created by the human species from a shared consciousness. But, Aunt Hillary has/is an “I” of her own, distinct from those if any of her composite ants; the Internet – at its present stage of development – has not. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2014, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/44 "2014-08-22T22:31:10Z")
Once upon a time I read a fascinating hypothesis that early humans were capable of communication with one another but did not “think”. Rather, they “heard” a godlike voice in their head telling them what to do. The beginning of consciousness was the de-personification of this voice and accepting it as one’s own intentions. I don’t claim this as being authoritative, I just found it a very interesting concept. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2014, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/45 "2014-08-22T22:52:26Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#): > > Once upon a time I read a fascinating hypothesis that early humans were capable of communication with one another but did not “think”. Rather, they “heard” a godlike voice in their head telling them what to do. The beginning of consciousness was the de-personification of this voice and accepting it as one’s own intentions. > > I don’t claim this as being authoritative, I just found it a very interesting concept. This is almost certainly the [Julian Jaynes “Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”](http://www.julianjaynes.org/bicameralmind.php) idea. (The link is to the Julian Jaynes Society, which might not be objective, but which presents the idea in its most attractive form.) A lot of people don’t agree with the idea. (Many of us think it’s utter bunk.) But it definitely is interesting, and has spurred significant debate, discussion, and awareness. Sometimes, even bad philosophy is good to have around! ETA: have I mentioned how much I like your login name? Very cool! It’d be nifty to serve aboard that ship! ---
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2014, 1:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/46 "2014-08-27T13:48:26Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > This is almost certainly the [Julian Jaynes “Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”](http://www.julianjaynes.org/bicameralmind.php) idea. (The link is to the Julian Jaynes Society, which might not be objective, but which presents the idea in its most attractive form.) > > A lot of people don’t agree with the idea. (Many of us think it’s utter bunk.) But it definitely is interesting, and has spurred significant debate, discussion, and awareness. > > Sometimes, even bad philosophy is good to have around! > > ETA: have I mentioned how much I like your login name? Very cool! It’d be nifty to serve aboard that ship! Weta only sounds like an interesting read! I will keep an eye out for it, thanks. ---
**Author:** ![common\_good](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f475e1/32.png) [@common\_good](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/common_good)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2014, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/47 "2014-08-27T20:29:44Z")
I don’t know. Ask when I’m awake. Right now I’m wrestling with a whale in my bathtub. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2014, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/48 "2014-08-27T20:39:07Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > This is almost certainly the [Julian Jaynes “Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”](http://www.julianjaynes.org/bicameralmind.php) idea. (The link is to the Julian Jaynes Society, which might not be objective, but which presents the idea in its most attractive form.) > > A lot of people don’t agree with the idea. (Many of us think it’s utter bunk.) But it definitely is interesting, and has spurred significant debate, discussion, and awareness. > > Sometimes, even bad philosophy is good to have around! > > ETA: have I mentioned how much I like your login name? Very cool! It’d be nifty to serve aboard that ship! Strikes me as complete bunk; but then, I haven’t read the actual book. Does the author propose that (say) pre-contact Inca, Polynesians, or present-day tribes such as the Innuit or Yananamo are “unconcious”? ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2014, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/49 "2014-08-27T20:50:16Z")
**Malthus** : Dunno. I’ve never read the book, and don’t intend to. However! Breaking news! Latest issue of Scientific American reports experiments that suggest that birds are “conscious” – or, specifically, aware of their own thinking. I can’t really give it in proper detail – and I don’t completely get it myself – but scientists did some experiments with Western Scrub Jays, putting good in containers where the Jays could watch, and then noting how the Jays acted on the knowledge. (There’s much more to it than this…) [Ah! Here’s a link to the article!](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/western-scrub-jays-are-capable-of-metacognition/) Y’all read it and see if it makes sense to you. I’m out of my depth. Anyway, the conclusion of the article is that the Jays are capable of “thinking about their own thinking,” and that they have “metacognition.” Bloomin’ birds! I would have thought this kind of thing was restricted to mammals. What incredibly nifty news! ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2014, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/50 "2014-08-27T20:51:20Z")
> [@common\_good](#): > > I don’t know. Ask when I’m awake. Right now I’m wrestling with a whale in my bathtub. Something about immoral porpoises, but let it pass, let it pass. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2014, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/51 "2014-08-27T20:56:22Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > **Malthus** : Dunno. I’ve never read the book, and don’t intend to. > > However! Breaking news! Latest issue of Scientific American reports experiments that suggest that birds are “conscious” – or, specifically, aware of their own thinking. I can’t really give it in proper detail – and I don’t completely get it myself – but scientists did some experiments with Western Scrub Jays, putting good in containers where the Jays could watch, and then noting how the Jays acted on the knowledge. (There’s much more to it than this…) > > [Ah! Here’s a link to the article!](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/western-scrub-jays-are-capable-of-metacognition/) Y’all read it and see if it makes sense to you. I’m out of my depth. > > Anyway, the conclusion of the article is that the Jays are capable of “thinking about their own thinking,” and that they have “metacognition.” > > Bloomin’ birds! I would have thought this kind of thing was restricted to mammals. What incredibly nifty news! From the article: > [@](#): > > Watanabe devised a way to test them. He let five birds watch two researchers hide food, in this case a wax worm. The first researcher could hide the food in any of four cups lined up in front of him. The second had three covered cups, so he could place the food only in the open one. The trick was that the researchers hid their food at the same time, forcing the birds to choose which one to watch. > > If the jays were capable of metacognition, Watanabe surmised, the birds should realize that they could easily find the second researcher’s food. The wax worm had to be in the singular open cup. They should instead prefer keeping their eyes on the setup with four open cups because witnessing where that food went would prove more useful in the future. And that is exactly what happened: the jays spent more time watching the first researcher. The results appeared in the July issue of the journal Animal Cognition. Sounds like they should set the “Mony Hall Problem” for these jays. Lots of people don’t get that. 😃 > **[Monty Hall problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem)** > > The Monty Hall problem is a brain teaser, in the form of a probability puzzle, based nominally on the American television game show Let's Make a Deal and named after its original host, Monty Hall. The problem was originally posed (and solved) in a letter by Steve Selvin to the American Statistician in 1975. It became famous as a question from reader Craig F. Whitaker's letter quoted in Marilyn vos Savant's "Ask Marilyn" column in Parade magazine in 1990: > Suppose you're on a game show, and you... ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2014, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/52 "2014-08-27T21:05:20Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > Strikes me as complete bunk; but then, I haven’t read the actual book. > > Does the author propose that (say) pre-contact Inca, Polynesians, or present-day tribes such as the Innuit or Yananamo are “unconcious”? Yes, it strikes a lot of people as bunk—I’m currently reading _The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach_ by Christof Koch, and the footnote in which he discusses Jaynes’ work basically ends with “…but obviously, his basic idea is completely wrong.” Still, the idea has a certain flavour of ‘it would have been cool if’ about it, which I think is why it continues to find some resonance. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2014, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/53 "2014-08-27T21:09:32Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Yes, it strikes a lot of people as bunk—I’m currently reading _The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach_ by Christof Koch, and the footnote in which he discusses Jaynes’ work basically ends with “…but obviously, his basic idea is completely wrong.” Still, the idea has a certain flavour of ‘it would have been cool if’ about it, which I think is why it continues to find some resonance. Heh, reading the description here, it sounds like it inspired _Snow Crash_. Which was, in fact, an awesome SF book. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2014, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/54 "2014-08-28T01:12:39Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Something about immoral porpoises, but let it pass, let it pass. No, no, it is the bowl of petunias. Watch for the bowl of petunias, if you can catch them, you might be able to find out what the “Oh no, not again.” was all about. After that, you should start looking for the question. ---
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2014, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/55 "2014-08-28T03:01:18Z")
> [@eschereal](#): > > No, no, it is the bowl of petunias. Watch for the bowl of petunias, if you can catch them, you might be able to find out what the “Oh no, not again.” was all about. > > After that, you should start looking for the question. I often feel like inanimate objects almost seem to have a consciousness, like mountains for instance. Maybe presence more like. I know this is impossible, but sometimes I get the sense that they just watch us silly humans rushing about, pretending to be important, while they just sit back thinking, yup, seen that before. Sort of like the way George Carlin said the earth would just shake us off like a bad case of the fleas. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2014, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/56 "2014-08-28T03:36:48Z")
> [@eschereal](#): > > . . . After that, you should start looking for the question. I’m not sure I’d survive very long in Hub City. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2014, 5:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/57 "2014-08-28T05:11:17Z")
It seems whenever we talk about consciousness, the focus is on self-awareness. Perhaps because in everyday parlance “conscious” just means an alert state, not asleep. But that’s one of the relatively “easy” problems. The far more intractable issues with consciousness are things like how we experience qualia such as pain and conscious identity (see the many threads on the star trek transporter hypothetical for what is meant by the latter). And the simple answer to the OP is there isn’t a good model for these things yet. We don’t know. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2014, 6:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/58 "2014-08-28T06:08:15Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > It seems whenever we talk about consciousness, the focus is on self-awareness. Perhaps because in everyday parlance “conscious” just means an alert state, not asleep. . . . Well… Is a sunflower “alert?” It has senses that can cause it to react to stimulus… What I think we’d like to do is to establish end-points, boundaries beyond which we can say, “Okay, over here, we’re all agreed.” No one holds that rocks are conscious, and pretty much all of us (I hope!) are agreed that the typical, standard, blue-stripe generic human being is conscious. Then we can practice Platonic reductionism, taking away faculties one at a time, until we have moved our (unfortunate) test subject from one end-point to the other. ---
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2014, 7:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/59 "2014-08-28T07:08:54Z")
Part of the difficulty perhaps is that we can never escape our own consciousness to experience life from outside of ourselves. The best we can do is extrapolate and assume that other people’s conscious is more or less like ours. That however may be mistaken assumption, since our environment also shapes our consciousness. Hence, if I was born Galway around the world in a state of war, what I would be aware of is that war is a normal state of affairs. I’m not sure how truly conscious any if us ever becomes until we emerge from our cocoons. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2014, 7:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013/60 "2014-08-28T07:10:59Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Well… Is a sunflower “alert?” It has senses that can cause it to react to stimulus… Exactly. So often when we have this debate everyone just discusses responses to stimuli, which is a Behaviourist’s dream (if that’s not a contradiction in terms…). But the elephant in the room is really the phenomenon we’re supposed to be discussing. > [@](#): > > What I think we’d like to do is to establish end-points, boundaries beyond which we can say, “Okay, over here, we’re all agreed.” No one holds that rocks are conscious, and pretty much all of us (I hope!) are agreed that the typical, standard, blue-stripe generic human being is conscious. I think this won’t go so well either, as there’s not great certainty even here. Are there any human p-zombies? I don’t know, I act as though the answer is no for various practical reasons. Do all animals with a nervous system feel pain? I don’t know, I act as though they do for various moral reasons. And so on. So yeah, at the far extremes we can draw lines; I’m confident a single neuron is not conscious, for example. But they are pretty much the only situations we can draw such lines. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness/696013.md?page=4)