Corvids and the mystery of self-awareness

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Atla
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Re: Corvids and the mystery of self-awareness

Post by Atla »

stevie wrote: March 13th, 2022, 12:26 pm
Atla wrote: March 13th, 2022, 8:25 am
stevie wrote: March 13th, 2022, 8:14 am Because your approach is not scientific.
I did say that some of this may just be my conjecture. But what do you think is more likely, that there is something to self-awareness or not?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness
In my native culture "self-awareness" is used in everyday communications about one's human mentality, so I too use this expression in everyday communications but that's just a casual use of the expression to be able to talk about private/subjective appearances not accessible to public observation. Clinical psychology and psychotherapy would hardly be possible without hypothesizing "self-awareness".
That's just subjectivity, not what self-awareness usually refers to.
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Atla
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Re: Corvids and the mystery of self-awareness

Post by Atla »

Gertie wrote: March 15th, 2022, 9:17 am I don't know about corvids, sorry.

I don't think there's anything more to being a self than an experiential sense of being a discrete, unified bundle of experiencing. So being a self, a me, is itself a form of experience, rather than being An Experiencer (noun) who has experiences.

So for a human the sense of being a unified, discrete self involves the experience of being embodied in the world, moving through space and time, with a specific first person point of view. This makes sense in evolutionary terms, if we look at human brains. There are subsystems which are complexly inter-connected via neural patterns, apparently 'designed' for evolutionary utility. Without some mechanism for making all these billions of neural firings coherent and unified, it would be an over-whelming, chaotic cacophany, and useless. So we have a unified, coherent field of consciousness, with the ability to filter and shift focus, which models and makes sense of the world and 'myself' in useful ways.


What part of that is the self - all of it imo. The experiential self which is gertie is whatever gertie is experiencing in the moment. Sometimes this is 'self-reflecting' on this or that aspect of what the experience of being gertie is like. Rather than gertie being The Experiencer reflecting on her experience.


It's hard to guess what the experience of being a dog or chicken or beetle is like, but I suppose we could look at what goes on in human brains when we self-reflect and see if other species have similar brain structures. It seems unlikely other species like corvids have that thinky narrative voice in their heads which conceptualises notions like 'Me'. But I'd say that thinky voice is just another form of experience, a different 'flavour' amongst many, and just as ''raw'' as any other.
But most women seem to have this looming sense of presence too, this sense of being, that seems to be missing from most organisms.

The female raw self-awareness doen't seem to be as strong as the male one (on average), and of course the female "I" is wildly different from the male "I". The male "I" is more like this sharp, strong, singular focus of attention that jumps here and there. And the female one is more like less sharp and strong, and more like centerless, multi-threaded, web-like.
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Atla
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Re: Corvids and the mystery of self-awareness

Post by Atla »

And then in the West, we have people who are convinced that a lot of other people are philosophical zombies. What they are really trying to say is that they keep encountering these people who don't seem to be self-aware, they seem to lack a sense of being.

Except in Western thinking, we conflate every kind of consciousness, so then people mistakenly jump to the conclusion that these p-zombies must lack any kind of subjectivity, internal experience. No, they have all that, except enough raw self-awareness to make to step 2 in my OP. That "emergence" of the raw sense of being and then the "I" never happens.

These people have an "I" that is truly just an empty, social construct. And when we deconstruct this "I" there really is nothing behind it.
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Atla
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Re: Corvids and the mystery of self-awareness

Post by Atla »

So then people wonder when our computers will become self-aware.

IF corvids have some basic self-awareness, then that would probably change a lot. It would mean that a processing of a certain kind (or of different kinds), when fast enough and packed tightly enough, could produce self-awareness in way less than a few ten billion simulated neurons. Machine self-awareness seems to be much closer this way.
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Re: Corvids and the mystery of self-awareness

Post by Pattern-chaser »

Atla wrote: March 27th, 2022, 3:30 am Claiming that the "I" is a real entity, is profoundly delusional. Claiming that it's 100% an illusion is still very delusional. Most humans aren't good at being in touch with reality, so they've adopted one of these two positions.
Binary thinking is immensely damaging, when it's used inappropriately. 👍 In some of us, it's so dominant that binary thinking is the only mode of thought that is used; this can be disabling in the worst cases. 😥
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Re: Corvids and the mystery of self-awareness

Post by Belindi »

In traditional legends the raven is a messenger. No smoke without fire.
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Re: Corvids and the mystery of self-awareness

Post by bibliotcamea »

Our perception system is capable of perceiving only a certain narrow range of "coarse‒material" vibrations - everything related to the manifestation of the biological bodies of all living beings, micro- and macro-objects of the surrounding world, as well as natural phenomena, etc.
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Re: Corvids and the mystery of self-awareness

Post by bibliotcamea »

Our perception system is capable of perceiving only a certain narrow range of "coarse‒material" vibrations - everything related to the manifestation of the biological bodies of all living beings, micro- and macro-objects of the surrounding world, as well as natural phenomena, etc.
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