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.
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Felix
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Felix »

Consul: Planaria do have a nervous system and even a central one (= brain)
Oops! Should have checked my referances, thanks.... However, they can regenerate a brain from scratch so to speak, i.e., they can grow a new head and brain from a headless body - a body from which the head has been severed. This suggests that nonspecific basal cells have the capacity to become "mindful" neurological cells. I wonder if the headless body retains memories of it's former brain that are transferred to its new one? That would be something!
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Gee
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Gee »

Belindi wrote: December 27th, 2019, 8:59 am Gee wrote:
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 realize that, but would argue that point. Bear in mind that I am studying what emotion is, not what it feels like. Also consider that 'feeling' is a "bucket" word. If it is tactile, we call it feeling. If it is moods, we call it feeling. If it is emotion, we call it feeling. If it is awareness, like I "feel" like someone is watching me, we call it feeling. We drop all of these different types of feelings into the "feeling bucket", but I am reaching in that bucket and trying to sort it out. So the source of the "feelings" is rather important to me.

You missed my point. Chemistry causes emotion, but emotion also causes the production of chemistry. Emotion is causal; it is real; it does not come from us as much as it comes to us. What it feels like comes from us.
Belindi wrote: December 27th, 2019, 8:59 am 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 emotional reactions.
When you talk about interpreting emotions, you are talking about feelings that come from us. When you talk about conceptualized emotions, you are talking about spirituality that also comes from us.

Emotion is reactive. It can be caused by thought, feeling, awareness, chemistry, and other emotion internally, but it can also be caused by objects and lives around us. It has an external reality that works, functions, between lives and between objects and us. It is this external emotion that I have been studying. Some people call this psychic, some call it "God", some recognize it as unconscious communication. I prefer unconscious communication as I don't really like magic.
Belindi wrote: December 27th, 2019, 8:59 am 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.
Well, I like Spinoza, a lot, but this does not apply to my studies at the moment. This is about analyzing internal feelings; it is not about the physical reality of emotion.
Belindi wrote: December 27th, 2019, 8:59 am
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?
Probably, but I don't really study the brain.
Belindi wrote: December 27th, 2019, 8:59 am
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.

Actually they don't; at least, not directly. What they do is mess with chemistry in our bodies, which in turn can do a lot of things from killing us from emotional shock to causing us to blush. One of the things we know emotion does is guide and activate survival instincts through activation of hormones. Hormones can play with DNA. To explain this idea further, I went to another forum and copied one of my posts from the thread, Consciousness and Evolution, for your review.

The following will give you a kind of synopsis of my thinking on this matter.

This first quote is what I was responding to:
Everything evolves(which realy, means that changes happen on such a slow scale they're hardly measurable) that conscious evolves is not an argument that consciousness is needed for (life's) evolution.
This quote is my response:
This is not entirely true. Although most evolution happens rather slowly, sometimes it is very rapid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution This link talks about rapid evolution under Speciation, and in other areas.

While nosing through the Evolution forum, I ran across a post that was talking about changes in DNA that caused mutations. (Don't know where, as I have been looking for a week and can not find which thread it was in.) Anyway, since I know very little about evolution, my first thought after reading that post was, "like Thalidomide". For those of you who don't know, or were too young, Thalidomide was a drug used in the mid 1950's. It was very good at relieving nausea and improving appetite, so it was given to a lot of pregnant women for morning sickness with disastrous results.

Conservative estimates say that 10,000 babies died from the horrible mutations, other estimates are much higher. Only a small fraction of the babies reached adulthood. You can learn about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide

No one is going to call Thalidomide evolution, as it was more tragedy than anything else. But it did teach us a few things: Chemistry can radically alter DNA and it can do it in one short gestation period. So if we are going to discount "God" and magic, it seems to me that the only thing that could have caused the rapid transformations that happened in bursts in evolution, it has to be chemistry that caused it.

These rapid transformation were usually preceded by a change in environment, so we are looking for a chemical that would be readily available in all species, would react to the awareness of the new environment and emotions of the life form, and have the capacity to change DNA in a way that would improve the specie's ability to survive. To me, this screams hormones. I don't see what else could possibly do it.

We know that hormones can cause emotion; we also know that emotions can cause the production of hormones; it is circular.

We know that hormones can substitute for each other and can cause the production of other types of hormones.

We know that hormones can turn off and on switches in DNA.
Belindi wrote: December 27th, 2019, 8:59 am I have never met anyone who claims emotions don't exist in the human . . .
But I would bet that you have met people who claim that emotion is fleeting, transient, elusive, or not something that you can base your decisions on as it is not trustworthy. I did not state that emotions do not exist in humans; what I stated is that emotion is dismissed as not relevant. Consequently, one of the most powerful components of consciousness is dismissed as not worthy of study, even though emotion is the mover and shaker, the motivator of life.
Belindi wrote: December 27th, 2019, 8:59 am Gee stated:
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.
You questioned which species have a CNS or brain; I gave you a 'rule of thumb'. None of this has anything to do with reaction to stimuli as all life reacts -- no CNS or brain is required for this type of reaction.
Belindi wrote: December 27th, 2019, 8:59 am Things like bacteria and algae don't have to learn as they adapt purely via the biological route.

You don't think that adapting is learning?
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' .
Interpretative equipment is not necessary if you consider the unconscious because experience is held in the unconscious.
Jung stated:
Just as the human body is a museum, so to speak, of its phylogenetic history, so too is the psyche.[15]
Jung, Collected Works vol. 9.I (1959), "Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation" (1939), ¶518 (pp. 286–287).
Belindi wrote: December 27th, 2019, 8:59 am I remark that's Lamarck.
So you are saying that Lamarck figured out where Nature keeps her memory?
Belindi wrote: December 27th, 2019, 8:59 am I did not know Jung meant agents' behaviours that the agents are unaware of.Interesting.
If you take Jung's Collective and Communal Unconscious and combine it with an understanding of ecosystems, what you get is behavior and physiological communication between species that is unconscious. Do you want an example?
Belindi wrote: December 27th, 2019, 8:59 am 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.
I like learning, but I am not an "ist" because I can't find an "ism" that I can completely agree with.
Belindi wrote: December 27th, 2019, 8:59 am 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.
I studied the SEP and became aware of most of the states of consciousness, but they relate mostly to humans and totally to species with brains. I am not interested in the brain, as there are enough people studying that.

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

Post by BigBango »

Gee wrote: If you take Jung's Collective and Communal Unconscious and combine it with an understanding of ecosystems, what you get is behavior and physiological communication between species that is unconscious. Do you want an example?
Gee is making a very important point here. That Jung has contributed very important insights as to the necessity of a collective unconscious to explain inter unconscious human communication as well as suggesting inter species unconscious communication is well accepted. What has not been illuminated are the mechanisms of that collective unconscious that make that possible.

What we need to focus on is the facts of the evolution of cells and multi cellular organisms. The fact that we have one cell as an ancestor of all multicellular life is very important. How much harder would be our task of discovery be if we had many different ancestor cells each with different mechanisms of DNA replication that were not universal across species. On our planet the story of life comes from the instantiation of one cell, or precursor RNA, that became the parent of all life.

Those facts suggest that there is ONE collective unconscious for all life on our planet.

It is my thesis that this collective unconscious is formed from a social connection between pre BC/BB galactic ecosystems that escaped the BC/BB only to return to their collapsed world where their giant black hole centers became atomic parts in the new world of cooled plasma.

In my theory the evolution of the world across the BC/BB does not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, entropy always increases. In contrast to my theory is science's notion that one or more quantum fluctuations of "nothingness" gave birth to a highly ordered world. That idea flies in the face of the 2nd law of thermodynamics and is simply nonsense.
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Felix
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Felix »

BigBango: It is my thesis that this collective unconscious is formed from a social connection between pre BC/BB galactic ecosystems that escaped the BC/BB only to return to their collapsed world where their giant black hole centers became atomic parts in the new world of cooled plasma.
So just a more arcane version of the panspermia hypothesis, which dodges the question of how life originated.
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by BigBango »

Felix wrote: December 29th, 2019, 7:38 pm
BigBango: It is my thesis that this collective unconscious is formed from a social connection between pre BC/BB galactic ecosystems that escaped the BC/BB only to return to their collapsed world where their giant black hole centers became atomic parts in the new world of cooled plasma.
So just a more arcane version of the panspermia hypothesis, which dodges the question of how life originated.
My interest is in how life came into being from the life that must have existed before the BC/BB. I am not that interested in how life may have originated in the first place. I do not think life or "consciousness" is derivative from some other ontological primary. I do think "consciousness" of oneself as a physical body(Tamminen) is ontologically primary.

As far as panspermia is concerned, it simply kicks the can down the road. Crick, the former discoverer of the structure of DNA, turned his talents to the job of finding the neurological basis for "experiential" phenomena. He failed and as an afterthought kicked the can toward the discovery of answers that would be found in extra terrestrial life(panspermia) of which we have no data.

My program makes claims about the world we are in and are capable of measuring if we could have enough confidence that testing could be productive, if only to falsify my predictions. I have predicted that micro ecosystems are about 1 plank volume in size. We could test for their existence. The other evidence comes from an analysis of how the molecules of our macro world could have come from the collapse(BC/BB) of the world of galaxies that preceded our macro world. We must also couple that with the way in which ecosystems with very advanced technology must have escaped the BC/BB destruction and thereafter returned to their collapsed world(our world) to further their needs for energy.
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by RochelleDel »

Consciousness requires you to act and be present. It requires acknowledgement. It requires importance and what is in your surroundings.

To think is to be conscious. Experiences CAn not make you conscious. It is a gift from God
Then the question should be, if you are not conscious do you lose God's gift? But not permanently. If you die, you just settle for what you have. Is it possible to be given a second chance at consciousness? Under what circumstances? Experiences can promote soundness.
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by RochelleDel »

[quote=Zelebg post_id=341375

Consciousness requires, or is, intelligence.

I agree with that. Humans have the gift of consciousness. It feels, it enjoys, it understands. While comprehending the simple, you can do the extraordinary. Belief is intelligence. IT IS A sign of wonder and mystery. Life is filled with wonder and mystery.
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Sy Borg »

That's one definition of consciousness.

Still, there should be acknowledgement of the pain that simpler animals feel when they are injured. They are conscious, just not conscious of the passing of time, living much more in the moment.
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

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RochelleDel wrote: December 31st, 2019, 7:11 pm To think is to be conscious.
It is? As @Greta just said, that's one definition of consciousness...?
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Consul »

The extended mind thesis comes in two versions:

1. the extended cognition thesis [EXCOG]: extracerebral or extracorporeal entities are or can be parts (components/constituents) of mechanisms of cognition.

2. the extended consciousness thesis [EXCON]: extracerebral or extracorporeal entities are or can be parts (components/constituents) of mechanisms of (phenomenal) consciousness.

(By the way, the extended mind/consciousness thesis has nothing to do with allegedly consciousness-expanding altered states of mind/consciousness.)

"[W]e will argue that perceptual consciousness is sometimes realised by cycles of embodied and world-involving engagement. Thus, the realisers of perceptual experience can extend beyond the brain to include bodily and worldly elements. We call this the thesis of extended consciousness. We do not claim this is true of all forms of conscious experience. The kind of experiences we have while imagining something, or during dreaming, are forms of experience that are less directly tied to bodily activity than the experiences of the world we have during online perception. The position we defend here is that the mind has no fixed boundary. The locus of conscious experience can smoothly shift from on occasions being inside of the head of the individual to on other occasions forming out of a nexus of interactions between brain, body, and environment." (p. 1)

"We argue that perceptual consciousness is realised in interactions among neural, bodily, and environmental dynamics and that these interactions have a particular temporal structure." (p. 3)

"EM [the extended-mind thesis] claims that under certain conditions cognitive processes and cognitive systems may be constituted or realised by resources distributed across the brain, the body, and the environment (…). It is thus a thesis that concerns the nature and breadth of the constituting base of cognition. We use the term “constitution” to refer to the metaphysical relation of dependence that holds between causal mechanisms and processes (typically biological) and the cognitive process whose nature we are interested in explaining. In sharp contrast to internalism of any stripe, EM is the view that in addition to neural activity within an individual, extra-neural bodily and environmental elements may be parts of the metaphysically sufficient conditions for some forms of cognition.

Internalist theories share in common the claim that while elements of the environment may exert a causal influence on cognition, such elements cannot contribute to the constitution or realisation of a cognitive process. Internalists maintain that cognitive processes are physically constituted by processes housed within the skull of the individual. Opponents of EM often accuse its advocates of failing to observe the metaphysical difference between a relation of mere causal dependence and a relation of metaphysical constitution or realisation."
(p. 8 )

"The thesis of extended consciousness claims that the biological machinery that realises conscious experience can sometimes include a mixture of neural, bodily, and environmental elements. It is a thesis about what is and is not part of the material substrate of a creature’s qualitative mental life (…). The notion of consciousness at stake is phenomenal consciousness." (p 25)

(Kirchhoff, Michael D., and Julian Kiverstein. Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing: A Third-Wave View. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019.)

Is EXCOG or EXCON true?
Note that the former doesn't entail the latter, so one can consistently accept the former and reject the latter. (David Chalmers is one of those doing so.)

What is acknowledged by everybody is that…

"The brain is embodied and the body is embedded. First, consider embodiment. All of the activities I described in the last chapter depend on signals to the brain from the body and from the brain to the body. The brain’s maps and connections are altered not only by what you sense but by how you move. In turn, the brain regulates fundamental biological functions of your body’s organs in addition to controlling the motions and actions that guide your senses. These functions include fundamental aspects of sex, breathing, heartbeat, and so on, as well as the responses that accompany emotion. If we include the brain as your favorite organ, you are your body.
Second, consider embeddedness. Your body is embedded and situated in a particular environment, influencing it and being influenced by it. This set of interactions defines your econiche, as it is called. It is well to remember that the human species evolved (along with the brain) in a sequence of such niches."


(Edelman, Gerald M. Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. pp. 24-5)
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

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Consul wrote: January 8th, 2020, 4:23 pm The extended mind thesis comes in two versions:

1. the extended cognition thesis [EXCOG]: extracerebral or extracorporeal entities are or can be parts (components/constituents) of mechanisms of cognition.

2. the extended consciousness thesis [EXCON]: extracerebral or extracorporeal entities are or can be parts (components/constituents) of mechanisms of (phenomenal) consciousness.
The extended mind thesis that you have offered us, in two forms, is [EXCOG] and [EXCON]. The only difference between these is that [ECON] is "phenomenal" consciousness and [ECOG] is simply derivative neural activity.

What we are mostly interested in, in this thread, is not ECOG but ECON.
Consul wrote: "EM [the extended-mind thesis] claims that under certain conditions cognitive processes and cognitive systems may be constituted or realised by resources distributed across the brain, the body, and the environment (…). It is thus a thesis that concerns the nature and breadth of the constituting base of cognition. We use the term “constitution” to refer to the metaphysical relation of dependence that holds between causal mechanisms and processes (typically biological) and the cognitive process whose nature we are interested in explaining. In sharp contrast to internalism of any stripe, EM is the view that in addition to neural activity within an individual, extra-neural bodily and environmental elements may be parts of the metaphysically sufficient conditions for some forms of cognition.

Again we are not focusing in this thread on [ECOG}
Consul wrote:
Internalist theories share in common the claim that while elements of the environment may exert a causal influence on cognition, such elements cannot contribute to the constitution or realisation of a cognitive process. Internalists maintain that cognitive processes are physically constituted by processes housed within the skull of the individual. Opponents of EM often accuse its advocates of failing to observe the metaphysical difference between a relation of mere causal dependence and a relation of metaphysical constitution or realisation." (p. 8 )
Again we are not that interested in [ECOG]. We are interested in phenomenal [ECON]
Consul wrote: "The thesis of extended consciousness claims that the biological machinery that realises conscious experience can sometimes include a mixture of neural, bodily, and environmental elements. It is a thesis about what is and is not part of the material substrate of a creature’s qualitative mental life (…). The notion of consciousness at stake is phenomenal consciousness." (p 25)
What gibberish is that! "The notion of consciousness at stake is phenomenal consciousness". What the hell is being asserted!
Consul wrote: What is acknowledged by everybody is that…
"The brain is embodied and the body is embedded.

If the brain is embodied "in the body" and the body is embedded in "nature" then then the brain is embedded in nature, dah.
(Edelman, Gerald M. Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. pp. 24-5)
[/quote]
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

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Consul, while it is important to define the differences between cognitive aspects of consciousness (ECOG) and phenomenal consciousness (ECON) that is only the beginning of the discourse we should be aspiring to. What we need to be aspiring to is a metaphysical accounting of the difference between ECOG and ECON.

What is your metaphysical accounting for this difference between the observed neurological processes (ECOG) and the phenomenological "feel" of experience?

Crick could not find it can you?
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Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Gee »

Atla, I apologize for taking so long to respond. Life got busy.
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm
Gee wrote: December 28th, 2019, 10:30 am 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.
At least you had the good sense to use the plural, organisms. Many people will imply that "first life" was individual, which I highly doubt. Everything that I have learned tells me that individual life is very unlikely. So my thinking is that first life had to have been produced in a mass and that it is likely that whatever causes bonding happened at the same time.
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm
Gee wrote: December 28th, 2019, 10:30 amOnce 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.
Yes. The more I study consciousness and the unconscious, the more sure I am about it.
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm That would make an interesting debate, personally I think it already goes too far.
It might make an interesting discussion. The people, who have the most problem with the idea of a shared unconscious, are the ones who think that consciousness begins and ends with the brain. The thinking is; IF consciousness comes from the brain, and each individual has their own brain, then what could possibly be shared? That argument actually makes sense, but is based on the invalid assumption that consciousness is thought. It is not. Consciousness is a communication of experience, which can also be caused by chemicals. One of the things the brain does is take analogue experience (the unconscious) and digitalize it into discrete data, which we understand as images and thoughts (consciousness).

I believe you are one of the few that I have talked to, who could actually understand the concept of the unconscious, because you know that consciousness is more than just the brain. Do you remember when we were discussing awareness, and I stated that awareness does not really have levels? It is an on/off thing? It is much like vision or hearing; either you can or you can't -- on/off. How well you can hear or see depends on your biology. What is referred to as levels of awareness is much like levels of hearing or vision and relates to the ability of the life form to focus that awareness, hearing, or vision -- biology. imo

Although consciousness does not have levels, it does have layers. The first layer would apply to everything and be something like Laws of Physics or QM, which we interpret as knowledge, but this knowledge is part of the universe and is probably based in balance. Panpsychism tells us that all matter has identity, much like a book has a title, but no awareness of that title, so identity would be another layer. Awareness would be a layer, which everything does not seem to have. When matter (identity) combines with awareness, the result is "self", or biological life, which is another layer. In my opinion this is the layer that introduces the unconscious, as I don't see consciousness as existing without awareness and self. A brain has the ability to cause another layer by digitalizing experience and reflecting it back; we call this the rational mind, or ego, or consciousness.

What is it that you think "already goes too far"?
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm The bonding mechanisms you mention take place in the brain, not in some yet undiscovered shared field.
Yet daffodils have survival instincts, as does grass, as do trees, and survival instincts are part of the unconscious. Do daffodils, grass, and trees have brains? They also communicate within the specie using pheromones, so I don't see that a brain is necessary for experience, information exchanges, or for bonding.

Maybe you could explain how you think bonding works in the brain and in reality and matter, because I could not get anything out of Feynman's explanations. Apparently my desk and my computer, both, have bonding in that they are just a bunch of atoms and molecules that seem to stick together to cause two different things. Bonding is not an easy subject and there is no reason to believe that bonding in matter is all that different from bonding in consciousness.
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm But to claim that all life shares it, is almost certainly wrong.
I disagree. There is a world of evidence that bonding is shared by all life, but this post is already too long.
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm 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,
So what? Magnetic fields are not limited to iron, but they do not seem to affect all metals or all matter just because it is within the field. And if life shares "information exchanges", then what is the medium that this exchange works through? I think it is the unconscious.
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm and also aren't really related to sentience.
Actually this is not true. There is a lot of research being done on EM fields and consciousness, and I read some reports and saw some videos on that subject in the science forum. One in particular that I remember involved a woman, who thought she was losing her mind. She started to have hallucinations and after it didn't go away, she sought medical help.

She was lucky, as there are too many doctors, who are willing to just throw pills at a psychiatric problem, but for whatever reason, her doctor investigated the problem. I don't remember all the details, but I do remember that it was only in her bedroom that she hallucinated. What was learned was that she lived close to some electrical plant, she had bought a new radio alarm clock, and she started to hallucinate after the purchase.

Throwing out the radio alarm and replacing it with another type of alarm solved her hallucination problems, as it was all related to EM fields. Other people may have thought that her bedroom was haunted -- this was not the case.

It is my thought that EM fields are related to sentience; and work partly by opening or closing doors, or gateways, to the unconscious. Chemistry can do the same thing.

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

Post by BigBango »

Gee wrote: January 20th, 2020, 2:42 pm 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 wrote: So you take it for a fact that there is a shared unconscious between humans.
Gee wrote: Yes. The more I study consciousness and the unconscious, the more sure I am about it.
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm That would make an interesting debate, personally I think it already goes too far.
Gee wrote: It might make an interesting discussion. The people, who have the most problem with the idea of a shared unconscious, are the ones who think that consciousness begins and ends with the brain. The thinking is; IF consciousness comes from the brain, and each individual has their own brain, then what could possibly be shared? That argument actually makes sense, but is based on the invalid assumption that consciousness is thought. It is not. Consciousness is a communication of experience, which can also be caused by chemicals. One of the things the brain does is take analogue experience (the unconscious) and digitalize it into discrete data, which we understand as images and thoughts (consciousness).

I believe you are one of the few that I have talked to, who could actually understand the concept of the unconscious, because you know that consciousness is more than just the brain. Do you remember when we were discussing awareness, and I stated that awareness does not really have levels? It is an on/off thing? It is much like vision or hearing; either you can or you can't -- on/off. How well you can hear or see depends on your biology. What is referred to as levels of awareness is much like levels of hearing or vision and relates to the ability of the life form to focus that awareness, hearing, or vision -- biology. imo

Although consciousness does not have levels, it does have layers. The first layer would apply to everything and be something like Laws of Physics or QM, which we interpret as knowledge, but this knowledge is part of the universe and is probably based in balance. Panpsychism tells us that all matter has identity, much like a book has a title, but no awareness of that title, so identity would be another layer. Awareness would be a layer, which everything does not seem to have. When matter (identity) combines with awareness, the result is "self", or biological life, which is another layer. In my opinion this is the layer that introduces the unconscious, as I don't see consciousness as existing without awareness and self. A brain has the ability to cause another layer by digitalizing experience and reflecting it back; we call this the rational mind, or ego, or consciousness.

What is it that you think "already goes too far"?
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm The bonding mechanisms you mention take place in the brain, not in some yet undiscovered shared field.
Gee wrote: Yet daffodils have survival instincts, as does grass, as do trees, and survival instincts are part of the unconscious. Do daffodils, grass, and trees have brains? They also communicate within the specie using pheromones, so I don't see that a brain is necessary for experience, information exchanges, or for bonding.

Maybe you could explain how you think bonding works in the brain and in reality and matter, because I could not get anything out of Feynman's explanations. Apparently my desk and my computer, both, have bonding in that they are just a bunch of atoms and molecules that seem to stick together to cause two different things. Bonding is not an easy subject and there is no reason to believe that bonding in matter is all that different from bonding in consciousness.
Very stimulating discussion. Thank you Gee and Atla.

What is interesting in this discussion is trying to uncover the metaphysics underlying Gee's careful observations of the nature of our inter species connectedness. That is, how can we account for the "collective unconscious".
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm But to claim that all life shares it, is almost certainly wrong.
Gee wrote: I disagree. There is a world of evidence that bonding is shared by all life, but this post is already too long.
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm 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,
Gee wrote: So what? Magnetic fields are not limited to iron, but they do not seem to affect all metals or all matter just because it is within the field. And if life shares "information exchanges", then what is the medium that this exchange works through? I think it is the unconscious.
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm and also aren't really related to sentience.
Yes Gee the medium is the unconscious. But what is the unconscious? See "Genesis of the Cosmos" by Paul A. LaViolette.

He is a modern architect of contemporary cosmology and a critic of our current understanding of the BC/BB and the nature of space between objects. He offers a different interpretation of the BC/BB that includes accounts from our pre-Egyptians about the "Great Separation". The great separation preceded the BC/BB and can only be accounted for by the technological prowess of the old civilizations that sought to escape the Big Crunch.

The resulting BC/BB resulted in a world of collapsed galaxies minus the escaped ecologies that eventually came back to their world which had collapsed in the BC. Their galactic centers were now our molecular parts, quarks. This collapse does not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics as does the theory of a quantum fluctuation of the "nothingness". To calculate the size of these ecologies that escaped the BC/BB one just needs to take the ratio of X/(the size of pre BC/BB galactic centers) = the size of our solar system/(the size of our galactic black hole center)and solve for X. It comes out to about a Planck volume.

That conclusion leads to the conjecture that the "collective unconscious" is the social media of those pre BC/BB galactic civilizations that survived the BC/BB. It is those civilizations that have created the "First Life" on our planet. The reason they did this is to harvest energy for their own purposes by creating creatures that would have some casual efficacy over the gigantic world they found themselves in.
Gee wrote: Although consciousness does not have levels, it does have layers. The first layer would apply to everything and be something like Laws of Physics or QM, which we interpret as knowledge, but this knowledge is part of the universe and is probably based in balance. Panpsychism tells us that all matter has identity, much like a book has a title, but no awareness of that title, so identity would be another layer. Awareness would be a layer, which everything does not seem to have. When matter (identity) combines with awareness, the result is "self", or biological life, which is another layer. In my opinion this is the layer that introduces the unconscious, as I don't see consciousness as existing without awareness and self. A brain has the ability to cause another layer by digitalizing experience and reflecting it back; we call this the rational mind, or ego, or consciousness.
Gee that is a really good summary. Thank you.
Atla
Posts: 2540
Joined: January 30th, 2018, 1:18 pm

Re: Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

Post by Atla »

BigBango wrote: January 21st, 2020, 9:43 am
Gee wrote: January 20th, 2020, 2:42 pm 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 wrote: So you take it for a fact that there is a shared unconscious between humans.
Gee wrote: Yes. The more I study consciousness and the unconscious, the more sure I am about it.
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm That would make an interesting debate, personally I think it already goes too far.
Gee wrote: It might make an interesting discussion. The people, who have the most problem with the idea of a shared unconscious, are the ones who think that consciousness begins and ends with the brain. The thinking is; IF consciousness comes from the brain, and each individual has their own brain, then what could possibly be shared? That argument actually makes sense, but is based on the invalid assumption that consciousness is thought. It is not. Consciousness is a communication of experience, which can also be caused by chemicals. One of the things the brain does is take analogue experience (the unconscious) and digitalize it into discrete data, which we understand as images and thoughts (consciousness).

I believe you are one of the few that I have talked to, who could actually understand the concept of the unconscious, because you know that consciousness is more than just the brain. Do you remember when we were discussing awareness, and I stated that awareness does not really have levels? It is an on/off thing? It is much like vision or hearing; either you can or you can't -- on/off. How well you can hear or see depends on your biology. What is referred to as levels of awareness is much like levels of hearing or vision and relates to the ability of the life form to focus that awareness, hearing, or vision -- biology. imo

Although consciousness does not have levels, it does have layers. The first layer would apply to everything and be something like Laws of Physics or QM, which we interpret as knowledge, but this knowledge is part of the universe and is probably based in balance. Panpsychism tells us that all matter has identity, much like a book has a title, but no awareness of that title, so identity would be another layer. Awareness would be a layer, which everything does not seem to have. When matter (identity) combines with awareness, the result is "self", or biological life, which is another layer. In my opinion this is the layer that introduces the unconscious, as I don't see consciousness as existing without awareness and self. A brain has the ability to cause another layer by digitalizing experience and reflecting it back; we call this the rational mind, or ego, or consciousness.

What is it that you think "already goes too far"?
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm The bonding mechanisms you mention take place in the brain, not in some yet undiscovered shared field.
Gee wrote: Yet daffodils have survival instincts, as does grass, as do trees, and survival instincts are part of the unconscious. Do daffodils, grass, and trees have brains? They also communicate within the specie using pheromones, so I don't see that a brain is necessary for experience, information exchanges, or for bonding.

Maybe you could explain how you think bonding works in the brain and in reality and matter, because I could not get anything out of Feynman's explanations. Apparently my desk and my computer, both, have bonding in that they are just a bunch of atoms and molecules that seem to stick together to cause two different things. Bonding is not an easy subject and there is no reason to believe that bonding in matter is all that different from bonding in consciousness.
Very stimulating discussion. Thank you Gee and Atla.

What is interesting in this discussion is trying to uncover the metaphysics underlying Gee's careful observations of the nature of our inter species connectedness. That is, how can we account for the "collective unconscious".
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm But to claim that all life shares it, is almost certainly wrong.
Gee wrote: I disagree. There is a world of evidence that bonding is shared by all life, but this post is already too long.
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm 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,
Gee wrote: So what? Magnetic fields are not limited to iron, but they do not seem to affect all metals or all matter just because it is within the field. And if life shares "information exchanges", then what is the medium that this exchange works through? I think it is the unconscious.
Atla wrote: December 28th, 2019, 3:30 pm and also aren't really related to sentience.
Yes Gee the medium is the unconscious. But what is the unconscious? See "Genesis of the Cosmos" by Paul A. LaViolette.

He is a modern architect of contemporary cosmology and a critic of our current understanding of the BC/BB and the nature of space between objects. He offers a different interpretation of the BC/BB that includes accounts from our pre-Egyptians about the "Great Separation". The great separation preceded the BC/BB and can only be accounted for by the technological prowess of the old civilizations that sought to escape the Big Crunch.

The resulting BC/BB resulted in a world of collapsed galaxies minus the escaped ecologies that eventually came back to their world which had collapsed in the BC. Their galactic centers were now our molecular parts, quarks. This collapse does not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics as does the theory of a quantum fluctuation of the "nothingness". To calculate the size of these ecologies that escaped the BC/BB one just needs to take the ratio of X/(the size of pre BC/BB galactic centers) = the size of our solar system/(the size of our galactic black hole center)and solve for X. It comes out to about a Planck volume.

That conclusion leads to the conjecture that the "collective unconscious" is the social media of those pre BC/BB galactic civilizations that survived the BC/BB. It is those civilizations that have created the "First Life" on our planet. The reason they did this is to harvest energy for their own purposes by creating creatures that would have some casual efficacy over the gigantic world they found themselves in.
Gee wrote: Although consciousness does not have levels, it does have layers. The first layer would apply to everything and be something like Laws of Physics or QM, which we interpret as knowledge, but this knowledge is part of the universe and is probably based in balance. Panpsychism tells us that all matter has identity, much like a book has a title, but no awareness of that title, so identity would be another layer. Awareness would be a layer, which everything does not seem to have. When matter (identity) combines with awareness, the result is "self", or biological life, which is another layer. In my opinion this is the layer that introduces the unconscious, as I don't see consciousness as existing without awareness and self. A brain has the ability to cause another layer by digitalizing experience and reflecting it back; we call this the rational mind, or ego, or consciousness.
Gee that is a really good summary. Thank you.
You two can carry on, I've grown tired of random fantasies presented as scientific facts.
True philosophy points to the Moon
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