Primitive manifestation doesn't entail awareness (identification, understanding, memory, confirmation). It would just be how _X_ exists independent of both the representations of humans and the bizarre alternative of an absent manner of being (not even nothingness).
To get consciousness (non-zombie type), more complex manifestations would have to be systematically arranged/manipulated to verify and recognize/acknowledge each other. There's nothing like that occurring outside the evolutionary development of biology and (potential) technology.
The whole problem [or confusion] here stems from philosophers and some scientists conflating a basic capacity for "phenomenal presentations" or "appearances" in matter with labels like consciousness, "subjective", mental, psychological, etc. The latter classifications aren't applicable at the level of atoms, particle interactions, 24 quantum fields, etc.
It's simply an ontological attribute. Often referred to as "intrinsic states", in contrast to the extrinsic relationships and measurements (quantitative representations) that science deals with in its descriptions of matter and macroscopic physical "stuff".
- - - - - - - - -
Lee Smolin: The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains.
Michael Lockwood: Do we therefore have no genuine knowledge of the intrinsic character of the physical world? So it might seem. But, according to the line of thought I am now pursuing, we do, in a very limited way, have access to content in the material world as opposed merely to abstract casual structure, since there is a corner of the physical world that we know, not merely by inference from the deliverances of our five senses, but because we are that corner. It is the bit within our skulls, which we know by introspection. In being aware, for example, of the qualia that seemed so troublesome for the materialist, we glimpse the intrinsic nature of what, concretely, realizes the formal structure that a correct physics would attribute to the matter of our brains. In awareness, we are, so to speak, getting an insider's look at our own brain activity.
Bertrand Russell: I maintain an opinion which all other philosophers find shocking: namely, that people's thoughts are in their heads. The light from a star travels over intervening space and causes a disturbance in the optic nerve ending in an occurrence in the brain. What I maintain is that the occurrence in the brain is a visual sensation. I maintain, in fact, that the brain consists of thoughts --using thought-- in its widest sense, as it is used by Descartes. What I maintain is that we can witness or observe what goes on in our heads, and that we cannot witness or observe anything else at all.
David Chalmers: It is often noted that physics characterizes its basic entities only extrinsically, in terms of their relations to other entities, which are themselves characterized extrinsically, and so on. The intrinsic nature of physical entities is left aside. Some argue that no such intrinsic properties exist, but then one is left with a world that is pure causal flux (a pure flow of information) with no properties for the causation to relate. If one allows that intrinsic properties exist, a natural speculation given the above is that the intrinsic properties of the physical - the properties that causation ultimately relates - are themselves phenomenal properties. We might say that phenomenal properties are the internal aspect of information. This could answer a concern about the causal relevance of experience - a natural worry, given a picture on which the physical domain is causally closed, and on which experience is supplementary to the physical. The informational view allows us to understand how experience might have a subtle kind of causal relevance in virtue of its status as the intrinsic nature of the physical. This metaphysical speculation is probably best ignored for the purposes of developing a scientific theory, but in addressing some philosophical issues it is quite suggestive.
John Gregg: It is worth noting that, properly speaking, physicalism itself can be seen as a kind of functionalism. This is because at the lowest level, every single thing that physics talks about (electrons, quarks, etc.) is defined in terms of its behavior with regard to other things in physics. If it swims like an electron and quacks like an electron, its an electron. It simply makes no sense in physics to say that something might behave exactly like an electron, but not actually be one. Because physics as a field of inquiry has no place for the idea of qualitative essences, the smallest elements of physics are characterized purely in functional terms, as black boxes in a block diagram. What a photon is, is defined exclusively in terms of what it does, and what it does is (circularly) defined exclusively in terms of the other things in physics (electrons, quarks, etc., various forces, a few constants). Physics is a closed, circularly defined system, whose most basic units are defined functionally. Physics as a science does not care about the intrinsic nature of matter, whatever it is that actually implements the functional characteristics exhibited (and described so perfectly in our laws of physics) by the lowest level elements of matter. Thus physics itself is multiply realizable.
_
Last edited:
