It depends on what you mean as "consciousness". There has long been a reluctance to deal with subjectivity because science is about objectivity, hence the occasional boffin claiming that consciousness is a meaningless by-product of biology. Neuroscience is a relatively young field but it does attempt to unravel the mysteries of subjective experience.Agent Smyth wrote: ↑March 27th, 2023, 9:26 pmTo my reckoning science has an interesting mix of conceptual schema that's reminiscent of the proverbial dog in the manger, loosely speaking that is. I'm not up-to-date with current (neuro)science but at first blush it seems as though consciousness is the neglected child of the field so to speak.Sy Borg wrote: ↑March 27th, 2023, 6:18 pmI am not sure that life and consciousness are separate either. While it is possible to be vibrantly alive and be only capable of basic sensing, and it's possible to be almost dead with a highly active mind, I see the phenomena of life and consciousness as essentially one and the same.
Meanwhile, the kind of consciousness that humans value in themselves and other humans is more the product of conditioning than intrinsic. If you lots in the jungle as an infant and raised by chimps, what aspects of a grown Agent Smith would be recognisable as the person writing on this forum? Not much. Most of what we value about our consciousness are hand-me-downs from family and society. A raw sense of being without such cognition is not valued, and is referred to as a vegetative state. Simple animal consciousness, too, is not valued, except in pets and other protected animals.
So we have the raw phenomenon of consciousness which, frankly, hardly anyone cares about, and you have a distinctly human mentality that has been conditioned from birth. Part of the problem of consciousness is that an essentially social phenomenon is treated as a physics problem.
As said earlier, consciousness of the type that we value and discuss is a social phenomenon. Having science tease it out is akin to having scientists analyse art to see why it works. They can do it, sure, but the tools they use are not ideal for the task. We are dealing with the intersection of neuroplasticity and cultural conditioning. A mad scientist who was committed enough could condition infants to be mentally anything - what if they are mainly exposed to mice? They will be different to mainly exposed to dogs or chimps. Humans don't have to grow up to think like humans but they do through cultural conditioning.