Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
Atla
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Atla »

Gee wrote: December 25th, 2019, 1:21 am
Atla wrote: December 24th, 2019, 6:06 pm
Then you are only talking about psychology, neuroscience. So, ignoring like half of the problem of consciousness.
Perhaps you are used to people, who argue Monism v Dualism, as most philosophers do, so you think that I have chosen a side. I have not. I study psychology because it gives a base and contrast of ideas when studying religions. Religions are important to study because religion is actually a study of consciousness. I look at what neurology tells me, but it is limited, so I find that biology gives more information. Ecosystems give more information yet, and the histories of cultures, societies, evolution, and the world are necessary to understanding. Physics is also important, but I don't understand it well enough to study the Universe. Of course, philosophy also adds a lot of information.
Atla wrote: December 24th, 2019, 6:06 pm And only talking about the everyday human world philosophy, but not the 'absolute' level philosophy. So, ignoring like half of philosophy.
What "absolute"? The only thing that I have ever found in philosophy that could be called "absolute" is that balance applies to everything everywhere.
Atla wrote: December 24th, 2019, 6:06 pm But then I don't see what you are after?
At the moment, I am looking into the concepts of "self", bonding, emotion, and the probability that EMF is relevant to the forces in consciousness, specifically awareness and/or emotion. There has been some study on awareness, but almost no one studies emotion. Yes, they study what emotion feels like, but they do not seem to study what it is. To help you understand my problem, consider the following:

When you were a child, did you ever take a nine volt battery and touch it to your tongue and feel the sharp tingling on your tongue? I know I did, as it was a common dare when I was a child. Afterward, if someone asked you what electricity was, would you state that it is a sharp tingling on the tongue? Of course not. That is what it felt like, not what it is.

I don't want to know what emotion feels like, I want to know what it is. I want to know how it causes bonding. I want to know why some form of it is in all life. I want to know how it activates and actually causes the production of matter. I want to know how it can transport the "self" to another time and place as in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I want to know how it can stop life as in emotional shock, or distort time when we experience emotional trauma. I want to know how it not only distorts time, but why it does not even acknowledge time. In short, I want to understand emotion.

Gee
Okay I give up. There isn't a form of emotion that's in all life. And concerning the 'components' of consciousness that are indeed in all life, well 1. they aren't limited to life, 2. everyday human world philosophy doesn't address those issues.
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Belindi »

Gee wrote:
I don't want to know what emotion feels like, I want to know what it is.
Emotion is the set of physiological effects of chemical messengers that are the products of endocrine glands; plus the neurochemicals that connect neurons at their synapses and this also act as messengers.

You are right to separate what emotion is from what emotion feels like. Emotions are not about 'feels like' until nerves feed back via afferent nerves to the cerebral cortex, which is concerned with interpretation.

I don't know which animals or plants have or have not central nervous systems like in human cerebral cortices. It's more likely IMO more animals or plants have chemical messengers in their systems than that they have interpretive equipment.

Interpretative equipment is necessary for learning from experience whereas 'instinctive' knowledge is not learned but is inherent or 'hard wired' .

I don't know about the pain , irritability, and discomfort mechanism.I guess it is not interpretative but may be local to the site of the irritation or injury. Pain and discomfort are of course also centralised in the cerebral cortex at such stages as the human's ability to interpret where the pain or discomfort is and often also to explain what is causing the pain. The reflex arc is well understood

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z ... revision/3

The above model for understanding is not the only one. However I doubt if any model that does not chime with modern science will even be comprehensible.
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Consul »

Gee wrote: December 24th, 2019, 4:04 pmAnd yet, the statement: "The defining features of consciousness, Level 1: General biological features, which apply to all living things" was posted at the top of page of the definition.
It appears that either you are wrong, or the evidence that you posted is wrong. Either way, your position is untenable.
No, it's not; but Feinberg's&Mallatt's formulation is indeed misleading. Instead of "defining features of consciousness" they should have written "necessary (pre)conditions of consciousness", with sufficient conditions being found on level 3 only.
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Consul
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Consul »

The broad concept of emotion and the narrow one:

"Emotions are usually characterized by (a) physiological features: physiological arousal, physiological and physiognomic expression, automatic appraisal, neural processing in limbic circuits of the brain; (b) phenomenal features: a subjective qualitative feel; (c) cognitive features: cognitive antecedents and successors, (d) an intentional object; (e) behavioral features: certain (inter-)action tendencies."
(p. 6)

"Tokens of emotions can be characterized by a large set of different characteristic properties:
1. automatic appraisal that is tuned to: quick onset, brief duration, and typically unbidden occurrence
2. distinctive physiognomic and physiological reactions
3. distinctive cognitions: thoughts, memories, images
4. distinctive subjective experience
5. interpersonal/interactive orientation
6. characteristic behavioral and motivational features
The list of properties includes the initially discussed aspects of the emotional experience: cognitive content and the distinct subjective feeling experience of emotion."

(p. 9)

(Zinck, Alexandra, and Albert Newen. "Classifying Emotion: A Developmental Account." Synthese 161/1 (2008): 1–25.)

Only b+4 are emotions in the narrow, "empiriological" or phenomenological sense; and I agree with Joseph LeDoux that the word "emotion" should be used in this sense only, i.e. to refer to a kind of subjective experiences, to subjectively experienced feelings or moods.

"Recent trends in basic emotions include approaches in which affect programs continue to contribute to emotion but in a less restrictive way. For example, James Coan treats emotions not as subjective experiences, but as emergent states that include amygdala activity, feedback from behavioral and physiological responses, and subjective experience. In other words, the experience is not the emotion but instead a factor that contributes to the emotion. This is an interesting approach, but I disagree with Coan’s treatment of subjective experience as just another factor in a mix of others that make emotions.

For me, the subjective experience—the feeling—is the emotion. These are not hardwired states programmed into subcortical circuits by natural selection, but rather cognitive evaluations of situations that affect personal well-being. They thus require complex cognitive processes and self-awareness. Much of the rest of this book is concerned with the roots and origins of human cognition and consciousness. This will set the stage for me, at the very end, to present my cognitive view of emotions as conscious experiences."


(LeDoux, Joseph. The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. New York: Viking, 2019. p. 200)

"[T]hose who argue that emotions are conscious experiences sometimes claim that such experiences are just one aspect or component of emotion. For example, the Swiss psychologist Klaus Scherer views emotion as a process consisting of cognitive appraisals, expressive responses, physiological changes, and conscious feelings. In this view, fear is what happens when we cognitively appraise a situation as dangerous, express certain behaviors in response to it, are physiologically aroused, and feel fear. This approach seems logically cumbersome to me because it regards fear as both the overall process and the specific feeling of being afraid; fear (the experience) is thus a component of fear (the process).

Fear, anxiety, and other emotions are, in my view, just what people have always thought they were—conscious feelings. We often feel afraid while we freeze or flee in the presence of danger. But these are different consequences of threat detection—one is a conscious experience and the other involves more fundamental processes that operate nonconsciously. The failure to distinguish the conscious experience of fear and anxiety from more basic unconscious processes, I argue, has led to much confusion. The more basic processes contribute to emotional feelings, but they evolved, not to make conscious feelings, but instead to help organisms survive and thrive. For the sake of avoiding confusion, the more basic nonconscious processes should not be labeled as 'emotional'."


(LeDoux, Joseph. Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety. New York: Viking, 2015. pp. 19-20)
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by BigBango »

Gee wrote: Perhaps you are used to people, who argue Monism v Dualism, as most philosophers do, so you think that I have chosen a side. I have not. I study psychology because it gives a base and contrast of ideas when studying religions. Religions are important to study because religion is actually a study of consciousness. I look at what neurology tells me, but it is limited, so I find that biology gives more information. Ecosystems give more information yet, and the histories of cultures, societies, evolution, and the world are necessary to understanding. Physics is also important, but I don't understand it well enough to study the Universe. Of course, philosophy also adds a lot of information.
Now we are getting somewhere. Ecosystems give more information yet, and the histories of cultures, societies, evolution, and the world are necessary to understanding. Physics is also important, but I don't understand it well enough to study the Universe. Of course, philosophy also adds a lot of information.

That is the path I have been following. I started out trying to answer the question "What would our world be like if it were very much older than it is now?". I looked at all those things you mentioned and decided that one of the biggest differences would be the general capability of technology, it would be very much more advanced. The collision that we can predict between our galaxy and Andromeda in 2 billion years sets the stage for our focus on developing technology that will help us keep our solar system from suffering either one of two disastrous results. We need to avoid being sucked into Andromeda's black hole center and we need to avoid being thrown out into some other space with totally unpredictable results. Want we want our technology to do is put our solar system into a safe orbit around the new black hole that Andromeda will form.

Why would we actually care to do that? We would care to do that because our very attachment to this life is embedded in the survival of our ecosystems to which our survival is dependent. In addition, the more nuanced character of our lives that comes from our special cultures and social groups represent our attachments that makes our lives special. We value these things. Unless we all become Buddhists and drop these attachments we will carry them forward and Technology is the only way to achieve that. Since it is a fact that we can see this collision coming other advanced life will be facing similar trends toward this or other cosmological catastrophes. In this way, galactic civilizations in our aging world will undoubtedly become socialized with each other using the advanced technology they develop to survive our aging world. This contact may really simply occur as an unintended consequence of the above mentioned technological advancements.

If we apply those thoughts to galaxies that may have existed before the BC/BB and we judge their world to be collapsing into a Big Crunch then we should judge them to be in a very old world that was approaching complete collapse. The civilizations in that pre BC/BB must have seen the writing on the wall just as we now see our galaxy colliding with Andromeda. It is not a stretch to imagine they would head for the hills with their ecosystems using advanced technology. They then waited for the plasma of the explosion to cool. They eventually returned to discover that the world they had formerly inhabited was again forming new galaxies. The problem was that when the plasma cooled their former "HUGE TO THEM" galactic centers had now become simply the quarks of the new matter that had formed. From that transformation from a world of big galactic centers(compared to the escaped ecosystems) to the molecular parts of a new world after the BC/BB they found their own ecosystems to be about the size of a Plank Volume, pretty damn small.

But they had KICKASS TECHNOLOGY.

What do you suppose they used that technology for? They used it to start life on, to them, HUGE planets. They sought out goldilocks planets that had complex molecules their TECHNOLOGY could paste and spilt chemical bonds.

NASA like projects created pre cursor RNA. Life evolved on these HUGE planets. The evolving life was a combination the newly evolving life driven by the genetic machines and structures that the tiny life built using their TECHNOLOGY.

Consciousness then evolved in the newly created creatures but was always present as the "consciousness" of the tiny ecosystems.

You may ask what is the difference between the two? The newly created creatures were basically simple individuals meant to harvest the energy of the BIG world for the benefit of its SMALL creators. The small creators are actually very highly socially integrated and technologically advanced TINY to us galactic civilizations.

Given this background of wild speculation one can start to make sense of what exactly is the nature of "experiential consciousness". When a small entity has an organism, cell or multi-celled, as its creation like a NASA project, then events in the BIG guy's life become echoed though the socialized output port communication links (think U Tube) and it either dies of little interest among the tiny linked ecosystems or it goes viral causing the hormone showers that we call "Feeling".
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Gee »

Atla wrote: December 25th, 2019, 1:54 am Okay I give up. There isn't a form of emotion that's in all life.
How do you know this? All life appears to be bonded to other life -- emotion causes bonding. Does something else cause bonding? All life has unconscious activity -- emotion rules the unconscious.
Atla wrote: December 25th, 2019, 1:54 am And concerning the 'components' of consciousness that are indeed in all life, well 1. they aren't limited to life,
I agree. Some of the components are limited to life; others are not.
Atla wrote: December 25th, 2019, 1:54 am 2. everyday human world philosophy doesn't address those issues.
Well, I am not going to ask your permission.

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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Gee »

Belindi wrote: December 25th, 2019, 6:09 am Gee wrote:
I don't want to know what emotion feels like, I want to know what it is.
Emotion is the set of physiological effects of chemical messengers that are the products of endocrine glands; plus the neurochemicals that connect neurons at their synapses and this also act as messengers.
The problem is that I don't think the above is true; at best, it is a half truth. It is true that chemicals can and do cause emotion, but it is also true that emotion can and does cause the production of chemicals -- it is circular. I argued this all over the science forums, and although no one seemed to like it, they could not dispute the validity of it because it is true.

This half truth is, in my opinion, the result of the Monism v Dualism wars, where people argue that everything comes from the physical, monism, or that it comes from "God" ("God" is love -- emotion) dualism. Personally, I see Monism v Dualism as a false dichotomy as each side is arguing half the truth and pretending that it is the whole of consciousness. It is not. One thing that I am sure of is that consciousness is a compound -- not one singular pure thing.

Most people do not realize that emotion can cause the production of hormones, hormones can cause the production of other types of hormones, and some hormones can actually turn on or off the switches in DNA. This means that there is actually a viable path between consciousness and evolution through emotion and hormones. I made the argument that this could apply in situations where there is a change in the environment that endangers life.
Belindi wrote: December 25th, 2019, 6:09 am You are right to separate what emotion is from what emotion feels like.

Thank you. I think that emotion has properties, affects the physical, and may be physical because it is clearly causal, but I don't know enough about it yet. There are also indications that it may not be physical because of its disregard for time.

A few years ago, I thought that awareness and emotion were simply different strengths of the same thing because they both work the same way, between things, are both some kind of force, and both cause a kind of bonding. Then I learned that awareness actually requires time to exist, but emotion does not even acknowledge time, so I no longer think they are the same.
Belindi wrote: December 25th, 2019, 6:09 am Emotions are not about 'feels like' until nerves feed back via afferent nerves to the cerebral cortex, which is concerned with interpretation.
I agree. Emotion is causal well before we are conscious of it. I know this because emotion is reactive and works through the unconscious. Once the nerves are involved, then we can get a "feels like", but it is when the brain and thought gets involved that we recognize a spirituality.

Emotion has three levels -- that I know of. First it affects the physical body causing bonding, influencing survival instincts, and playing with DNA. Second it works with the nervous system causing "feels like" and causing physiological reactions. Third it becomes known to the brain and thought which interprets it as spiritual. It is not a coincidence that science always says that religious, psychic, and spiritual experiences are caused by emotion. They are. The problem comes when emotion is dismissed as nothing; therefore, the experiences are dismissed as nothing, and the unconscious is dismissed as nothing. Study of the unconscious is imperative if anyone wants to understand consciousness. At this point, only psychology and religion study the unconscious.
Belindi wrote: December 25th, 2019, 6:09 am I don't know which animals or plants have or have not central nervous systems like in human cerebral cortices.

An easy 'rule of thumb' is to ask if there are senses in the specie. If there is vision, hearing, smell, taste, then there is someplace where the information is taken, or some kind of CNS/brain.
Belindi wrote: December 25th, 2019, 6:09 am It's more likely IMO more animals or plants have chemical messengers in their systems than that they have interpretive equipment.
Don't underestimate those "chemical messengers", as they do a pretty good job of interpreting things for single cell species. Not sure how much "equipment" is required.
Belindi wrote: December 25th, 2019, 6:09 am Interpretative equipment is necessary for learning from experience whereas 'instinctive' knowledge is not learned but is inherent or 'hard wired' .
I disagree with this. One of the things that I learned in the science forums is that Nature repeats things that work well, but does not repeat anything that does not work. This implies that Nature learns, so where is her "interpretative equipment"? A better question would be where does she keep her memory?

If instinctive knowledge is inherent, then where does a new specie inherit from? If it is hard wired, then how does that work? DNA? But DNA is just a map, and a map does not a city make -- building materials and labor are required.

So to my way of thinking, to answer the above questions, one either has to accept Jung's collective communal unconscious, go with the "God" idea, or they have to decide that everything is predetermined -- screw-ups and all -- which means that learning is pointless.
Belindi wrote: December 25th, 2019, 6:09 am I don't know about the pain , irritability, and discomfort mechanism.I guess it is not interpretative but may be local to the site of the irritation or injury. Pain and discomfort are of course also centralised in the cerebral cortex at such stages as the human's ability to interpret where the pain or discomfort is and often also to explain what is causing the pain.

I agree that it is likely local, as the cells interpret damage to the body and send for a repair crew before the cerebral cortex has been made aware. We can often have an injury that is already healing before we even know about it, so I am not sure that the cerebral cortex is necessary to interpret damage.

"Discomfort" is a good way to describe a cell's or bacteria's ability to interpret what it wants or does not want. On the level of the unconscious, everything works reactively in an attraction or repulsion kind of way, so "discomfort" would be a good description of something that the cell/bacteria wants to repulse.
Belindi wrote: December 25th, 2019, 6:09 am The reflex arc is well understood
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z ... revision/3
The above model for understanding is not the only one. However I doubt if any model that does not chime with modern science will even be comprehensible.
Thank you for the above reference. It was concise, easy to understand, and made it clear that both the unconscious and the conscious is involved in the process.

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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Gee »

Consul wrote: December 25th, 2019, 11:59 am
Gee wrote: December 24th, 2019, 4:04 pmAnd yet, the statement: "The defining features of consciousness, Level 1: General biological features, which apply to all living things" was posted at the top of page of the definition.
It appears that either you are wrong, or the evidence that you posted is wrong. Either way, your position is untenable.
No, it's not; but Feinberg's&Mallatt's formulation is indeed misleading. Instead of "defining features of consciousness" they should have written "necessary (pre)conditions of consciousness", with sufficient conditions being found on level 3 only.
Or maybe they could have just stated that if you don't start with conscious life in level 1, then if and when you get to level 3, you will have a zombie. Would that be clear?

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Atla
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Atla »

Gee wrote: December 27th, 2019, 1:35 am
Atla wrote: December 25th, 2019, 1:54 am Okay I give up. There isn't a form of emotion that's in all life.
How do you know this? All life appears to be bonded to other life ...
No, all life does not appear to be bonded to other life.
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Belindi »

Gee wrote:
Emotion is the set of physiological effects of chemical messengers that are the products of endocrine glands; plus the neurochemicals that connect neurons at their synapses and this also act as messengers.
Quoted Belinda
The problem is that I don't think the above is true; at best, it is a half truth. It is true that chemicals
Many people would not agree that there is a substantive difference between emotion and feeling. I agree with the claim that in species that conceptualise, to any extent of 'conceptualise',feelings are emotions that are subjected to interpretation . Not emotions but interpretation is local to the cerebral cortex. Interpreted emotions remembered as feelings also work top down so causing other emotiotional reactions.Here is an example which I think is among Spinoza's notes. Jealousy is a feeling compounded of fear which is basically an emotional reaction plus when the fear is attributed to the intention of an agent who intends to deprive you. Attributing something to an agent is a cerebral activity.The compounding of fear with another's intention is what gives jealousy its peculiar feeling tone.If you want to train a dog to relinquish its bone you have to teach it that its bone is safe with you.




I agree. Emotion is causal well before we are conscious of it. I know this because emotion is reactive and works through the unconscious. Once the nerves are involved, then we can get a "feels like", but it is when the brain and thought gets involved that we recognize a spirituality.
Without the brainy interpretation of an emotion I agree pleasure -pain is felt. Isn't pleasure-pain in the brain stem and not in itself concerned with conceptualisation?
Emotion has three levels -- that I know of. First it affects the physical body causing bonding, influencing survival instincts, and playing with DNA. Second it works with the nervous system causing "feels like" and causing physiological reactions. Third it becomes known to the brain and thought which interprets it as spiritual. It is not a coincidence that science always says that religious, psychic, and spiritual experiences are caused by emotion. They are. The problem comes when emotion is dismissed as nothing; therefore, the experiences are dismissed as nothing, and the unconscious is dismissed as nothing. Study of the unconscious is imperative if anyone wants to understand consciousness. At this point, only psychology and religion study the unconscious.
I did not know one's emotions interfere with one's DNA. I have never met anyone who claims emotions don't exist in the human although I have met those who claim plants have emotions and can be trained to be obedient " A dog, a woman, and a walnut tree, the more you beat them the better they be".
Belindi wrote: December 25th, 2019, 6:09 am I don't know which animals or plants have or have not central nervous systems like in human cerebral cortices.

An easy 'rule of thumb' is to ask if there are senses in the specie. If there is vision, hearing, smell, taste, then there is someplace where the information is taken, or some kind of CNS/brain.
If i understand you I don't agree because there are entities that are usually regarded as living and which react chemically to stimuli which is one of the criteria for life. The other criteria are concerned with metabolism.Things like bacteria and algae don't have to learn as they adapt purely via the biological route.
Belindi wrote: December 25th, 2019, 6:09 am Interpretative equipment is necessary for learning from experience whereas 'instinctive' knowledge is not learned but is inherent or 'hard wired' .
One of the things that I learned in the science forums is that Nature repeats things that work well, but does not repeat anything that does not work.
I remark that's Lamarck.

So to my way of thinking, to answer the above questions, one either has to accept Jung's collective communal unconscious, go with the "God" idea, or they have to decide that everything is predetermined -- screw-ups and all -- which means that learning is pointless.
I did not know Jung meant agents' behaviours that the agents are unaware of.Interesting. I disagree ,and I'm a determinist, about the value of learning as I claim liberal learning (not indoctrination!)is an eternal good to aspire to.




Thank you for the above reference. It was concise, easy to understand, and made it clear that both the unconscious and the conscious is involved in the process.
Gee you refer to the reflex arc and I understand your criterion of conscious and unconscious and I agree. However I prefer to add to 'conscious' the several known varieties of conscious. Waking consciousness, dreaming consciousness, hallucinating consciousness, liminal states, and meditators' consciousness are sub categories of consciousness.
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by BigBango »

BigBango wrote: NASA like projects created pre cursor RNA. Life evolved on these HUGE planets. The evolving life was a combination of the newly evolving life driven by the genetic machines and structures that the tiny life built using their TECHNOLOGY.

Consciousness then evolved in the newly created creatures but was always present as the "consciousness" of the tiny ecosystems.

You may ask what is the difference between the two? The newly created creatures were basically simple individuals meant to harvest the energy of the BIG world for the benefit of its SMALL creators. The small creators are actually very highly socially integrated and technologically advanced TINY to us galactic civilizations.

Given this background of wild speculation one can start to make sense of what exactly is the nature of "experiential consciousness". When a small entity has an organism, cell or multi-celled, as its creation like a NASA project, then events in the BIG guy's life become echoed though the socialized output port communication links (think U Tube) and it either dies of little interest among the tiny linked ecosystems or it goes viral causing the hormone showers that we call "Feeling".
Belindi wrote: Many people would not agree that there is a substantive difference between emotion and feeling. I agree with the claim that in species that conceptualise, to any extent of 'conceptualise',feelings are emotions that are subjected to interpretation . Not emotions but interpretation is local to the cerebral cortex. Interpreted emotions remembered as feelings also work top down so causing other emotiotional reactions.Here is an example which I think is among Spinoza's notes. Jealousy is a feeling compounded of fear which is basically an emotional reaction plus when the fear is attributed to the intention of an agent who intends to deprive you. Attributing something to an agent is a cerebral activity.The compounding of fear with another's intention is what gives jealousy its peculiar feeling tone.If you want to train a dog to relinquish its bone you have to teach it that its bone is safe with you.
First of all, when Belindi says " Interpreted emotions remembered as feelings also work top down so causing other emotional reactions". We have to ask ourselves if he could not just as well have said "Interpreted feelings remembered as emotions also work top down so causing other feelings". In other words it makes just as much sense to say it either way because emotions and feelings are basically synonyms.

The more important distinction is to differentiate between the consciousness of the constructed macro being and its collective unconscious which is the "consciousness" of the galactic civilizations that gave birth to that macro being.
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Felix »

Consul: You've misinterpreted them, because they do not mean to say that level 1 and level 2 are levels of consciousness, i.e. ones on which consciousness occurs. Levels 1 & 2 are necessary evolutionary conditions of consciousness but not sufficient ones. Sufficient evolutionary conditions of consciousness are found only on level 3!
You are misinformed, e.g., experiments with flatworms prove otherwise....

"In 1958, Irvin Rubenstein and Jay Boyd Best, two zoologists working at the Walter Reed Army Institute in Washington, were conducting experiments involving the learning capacity of a simple organism called the planarian worm. Planaria are incredibly simple creatures – no brain, no nervous system – so they make excellent subjects for experiments in the lab. The two zoologists were trying to study how they could learn without a brain. They put some planaria into a closed tube containing water – which planaria need to live. They then turned a tap which drained the water out of the tube. In a state of alarm, the planaria rushed along the tube looking for water. Soon they encountered a fork; one branch was lighted, and led to water; the other branch was unlighted, and didn’t. Soon, 90 per cent of the planaria had learned the trick of choosing, and when the water was drained off, they rushed along the tube and chose the lighted alleyway, whether it was the right or left fork.

But now a strange thing happened. As Rubenstein and Best repeated the experiment over and over again (with the same worms), the planaria began choosing the wrong fork. That baffled them. One of them suggested that perhaps they were bored with doing the same thing, and the wrong choice was the expression of the kind of irrational activity – like vandalism – that springs from boredom. The other asked how could they be bored when they had no brain or nervous system? But a few more experiments seemed to indicate that the boredom hypothesis appeared to be correct. As the experiments continued, the planaria would just lie there, refusing to move, as if saying: ‘Oh God, not again!’ They preferred to die rather than go looking for water. It seemed so absurd that Rubenstein and Best devised another experiment to test the boredom hypothesis.

This time they took two tubes, and a new lot of planaria. In one tube, which had a rough inner-surface, the water was down the lighted alleyway. In the other, which was smooth, it was down the dark alleyway. This was a far more complex experiment, and only a small percentage of the planaria learned which alleyway to choose. But that small percentage never regressed. They could do the experiment a thousand times and not get bored. Because they had been forced to put twice as much effort into the initial learning process, they achieved a higher level of imprinting – i.e. of purpose – and maintained it forever."
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Consul »

Felix wrote: December 28th, 2019, 6:24 amYou are misinformed, e.g., experiments with flatworms prove otherwise....

"In 1958, Irvin Rubenstein and Jay Boyd Best, two zoologists working at the Walter Reed Army Institute in Washington, were conducting experiments involving the learning capacity of a simple organism called the planarian worm. Planaria are incredibly simple creatures – no brain, no nervous system – so they make excellent subjects for experiments in the lab.…"
Planaria do have a nervous system and even a central one (= brain)!

"Planarians (suborder Tricladida, phylum Platyhelminthes) are considered to be among the most primitive animals to have developed a central nervous system (CNS)."

Source: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Pla ... ous_system
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
Gee
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Location: Michigan, US

Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Gee »

Atla wrote: December 27th, 2019, 3:11 am
Gee wrote: December 27th, 2019, 1:35 am
How do you know this? All life appears to be bonded to other life ...
No, all life does not appear to be bonded to other life.
Well, I certainly disagree with this. First, remember that all life comes from other life. It is an exclusive club that one must be born into. Once born, we have two years to establish a bond between our self and mother, and to bond with the others of our specie in the unconscious; otherwise, we die from SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome).

Then consider Jung's Collective Communal Unconscious. This unconscious is where we access the inherent survival instincts that keep us alive and prevent us from dying of SIDS. This bonding seems to be pretty necessary.

Second, note that there has been a tremendous amount of research done on bonding and isolation in humans in institutions from orphanages, to hospitals, to prisons, etc. It is generally agreed that a lack of bonding before the age of two can kill us, and a breaking of our bonds later in life through isolation can make us insane and eventually kill us. Bonding is necessary in humans.

Third, I will grant that there have not been many studies on other species, but Jung's Collective Communal Unconscious applies to all species as do the inherent survival instincts. So this appears to be necessary to all life.

Fourth, then if you study ecosystems, you will find that this communication and bonding is inter and intra specie.

Gee
Atla
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Joined: January 30th, 2018, 1:18 pm

Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Atla »

Gee wrote: December 28th, 2019, 10:30 am
Atla wrote: December 27th, 2019, 3:11 am
No, all life does not appear to be bonded to other life.
Well, I certainly disagree with this. First, remember that all life comes from other life. It is an exclusive club that one must be born into.
The first organisms didn't.
Once born, we have two years to establish a bond between our self and mother, and to bond with the others of our specie in the unconscious; otherwise, we die from SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome).

Then consider Jung's Collective Communal Unconscious. This unconscious is where we access the inherent survival instincts that keep us alive and prevent us from dying of SIDS. This bonding seems to be pretty necessary.

Second, note that there has been a tremendous amount of research done on bonding and isolation in humans in institutions from orphanages, to hospitals, to prisons, etc. It is generally agreed that a lack of bonding before the age of two can kill us, and a breaking of our bonds later in life through isolation can make us insane and eventually kill us. Bonding is necessary in humans.

Third, I will grant that there have not been many studies on other species, but Jung's Collective Communal Unconscious applies to all species as do the inherent survival instincts. So this appears to be necessary to all life.

Fourth, then if you study ecosystems, you will find that this communication and bonding is inter and intra specie.

Gee
So you take it for a fact that there is a shared unconscious between humans. That would make an interesting debate, personally I think it already goes too far. The bonding mechanisms you mention take place in the brain, not in some yet undiscovered shared field.

But to claim that all life shares it, is almost certainly wrong. What all life may 'share' is more like the electromagnetic fields on the planet, yes there may be some communication, 'information exchange' happening there between different species even, but once again these EM fields aren't limited to life, and also aren't really related to sentience.
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