If No Consciousness Exists, By What Right Does The Universe?

Holly-May Leslie said:
consciousness
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More it requires a brain

Being conscious is being awake and aware

Consciousness seems a puzzle to some along the lines of "How can a mostly water organ contemplate the Universe?"

My 2 cents, being conscious is being awake and aware, having consciousness is being awake and aware that YOU ARE awake and aware and circling around "How am I doing it?"

Once it clicks you are only a collection of chemicals engaged in a very complex activity (thinking about thinking) the goal is to work out HOW the process began

Onto the stage comes religion, which informs the masses "We KNOW"

Of course they don't, but they spin a good story

Religion, plague on humanity, unfortunately giving unverified stories for years

:)
 
Michael 345 said:
More it requires a brain

Being conscious is being awake and aware

Consciousness seems a puzzle to some along the lines of "How can a mostly water organ contemplate the Universe?"

My 2 cents, being conscious is being awake and aware, having consciousness is being awake and aware that YOU ARE awake and aware and circling around "How am I doing it?"

Once it clicks you are only a collection of chemicals engaged in a very complex activity (thinking about thinking) the goal is to work out HOW the process began

Onto the stage comes religion, which informs the masses "We KNOW"

Of course they don't, but they spin a good story

Religion, plague on humanity, unfortunately giving unverified stories for years

:)
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I agree that religion is generally bs, unless it is interpreted very metaphorically. Also, being conscious does not require a brain. It is very improbable that it would occur without one however.
 
Holly-May Leslie said:
I agree that religion is generally bs, unless it is interpreted very metaphorically. Also, being conscious does not require a brain. It is very improbable that it would occur without one however.
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Michael 345 said:
Being conscious is being awake and aware. No brain, no awareness:)
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When does sensory awareness become conscious awareness? Sensory awareness starts very early on in even brainless organisms.
Paramecium have no brain but respond positively to sensory stimulus. So do Slime mold, which have no brain but display remarkable abilities, solving mazes by chemical marking and have demonstrated memory of time intervals.

Does slime mold have memory?

Slime moulds’ memories are totally tubular
Simple one-celled organisms 'recall' the location of food using internal tubes made of a gel-like material. Even slime moulds have 'brains': a series of tubes that expand and contract to provide a memory of where food is located. Feb 22, 2021
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00478-1

d41586-021-00478-1_18873034.jpg

The slime mould Physarum polycephalum boasts a network of tubes that expand and contract when exposed to nutrients. Credit: Ray Simons/Science Photo Library

Behold the brain of the slime mold. It consists of "microtubules", that also allow the organism to walk as a pseudopod.
p.s. (see subforum Pseudoscience " Is consciousness to be found in quantum processes in microtubules?")
 
Michael 345 said:
Being conscious is being awake and aware. No brain, no awareness

:)
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One can not lack a perspective from one's own perspective. Therefore, one must have a perspective from one's own perspective, In any case, with or without a brain. I would say that being aware generally correlates extremely heavily with having a brain though, perhaps even without exception!
 
Michael 345 said:
What other part (feature) other than brain would you suggest MIGHT produce awareness?

Awareness, not just a reflex reaction

:)
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Awareness is not produced. It is just impossible for one to not be self aware, for reasons I just mentioned. I was looking into how it might correlate with brain processes however and I came across some interesting information about microtubules, presented to me by one anesthesiologist dr stuart hameroff, who proposes that awareness is the result of quantum processes inside of these microtubules, inside of neurons, and In particular inside of 3 giant pyramidical motor neurons.
 
Michael 345 said:
Are you implying you are self aware when sleep OR have been knocked unconscious????

:)
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I dream. I don't remember ever having been knocked unconscious, however. Anyway, there are special cases which are not exceptions to my claim despite your implication in which one might skip a particular period of time. That's not the same as being unaware, per se. It is just time travel.
 
Holly-May Leslie said:
I dream. I don't remember ever having been knocked unconscious, however. Anyway, there are special cases which are not exceptions to my claim despite your implication in which one might skip a particular period of time. That's not the same as being unaware, per se. It is just time travel.
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Lost me so I will leave you with your thoughts and definitions

Cheers

:)
 
Holly-May Leslie said:
Awareness is not produced. It is just impossible for one to not be self aware, for reasons I just mentioned. I was looking into how it might correlate with brain processes however and I came across some interesting information about microtubules, presented to me by one anesthesiologist dr stuart hameroff, who proposes that awareness is the result of quantum processes inside of these microtubules, inside of neurons, and In particular inside of 3 giant pyramidical motor neurons.
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Highlighted

Disagree

Awareness is produced through experience .
 
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C C said:
However, formal meanings of qualia apparently entail mental, perceptual, introspective, or subjective classification. So "qualia of existence" can be construed as a category mistake.
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But the classification that is made is entirely subjective, the processes producing that classification are objective, but the classification itself is entirely subjective and phenomological - in other words, the way it is experienced, not what makes the experience. When the brain categorizes different colors, it isn't that we objectively come to know of those colors, but subjectively. So qualia, I would think, can't be separated from subjectivity.


An adjective, like in "ontic qualia", might be introduced to distinguish such from the usual interpretation and background theory of a mind or brain setting. But this, of course, would also drag along its own background presuppositions or re-conceiving of what's going on.

In the above context, various "ubiquitous proto-consciousness" terms (gesturing toward panpsychism) should be tossed out the window; and it thereby be recognized that "manifestation" fundamentally has nothing to do with consciousness. Until a cognitive system recruits this "how matter exists to itself" (i.e., minus the technical descriptions of physics) to constitute the cognitive system's complex experiences (representations of processes associated with sensory data and thought).
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But how matter or anything at all really, exists at all is at the heart of the problem also of consciousness, they are both seemingly incapable of objective definition. Even mathematical equations isn't actually "the thing in itself" it only describes the outward appearence and interactions. It is really hard to conceive of any formula or theory that will make us understand how something exists in literal nothing, or how something could be uphold to existence.

Particles are excitments in fields, sure, but what are those fields made up of, what is a existential right to a field? We are getting deep in the woods here, but qualia/consciousness as the necessary subjective "spacetime" for experiences, is really similar to the spacetime of physical objective things.




As a further consequence, the meaning of "consciousness" should be adjusted to purely refer to memory-dependent activity where identification, understanding and so forth apply. Rather than "consciousness" almost exclusively referring to phenomenal experience as it is often wielded by philosophers today.
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There are of course two meanings of consciousness, the subjective meaning (which really only applies to the one that has the subjective experience of being conscious), and the objective meaning which is all we can measure and detect objectively. In science I can understand why one would prefer the objective meaning of consciousness, because that is what is relevant to measuring and testing the objective manifestation of subjective events. But we should keep in mind that science has yet to prove that such an objective world even exists, so why should philosophy prefer that meaning of consciousness? Isn't it the role of philosophy to do what science doesn't do? I think we should keep science to science (what is measurable) and philosophy to philosophy, or we would just be calling philosphy science and science philosophy.




Science could come closer to coping with traditional qualia than it could with "ontological qualia". Both would concern an intrinsic way that matter exists that cannot be expressed by quantitative, extrinsic relationships. But raw, "ontic qualia" would be completely aloof and unknown -- unlikely to resemble the phenomenal characteristics of our system-manipulated, cognitive-based experiences. IOW, too deep into the taboo of metaphysics.
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I'm not sure that I would agree that it wouldn't resemble our experiences, it would be unlike to a certain degree but there would also be likeness. Indeed, I think it is that likeness that makes us conscious. This is what existence feels like, but to a different degree and with a different flavour. Just as there are many colors and many levels of brightness, a color is still what a color is and always has the likeness of color.
 
Write4U said:
Are you sure. Ask it what a chair is and what it is used for, it will give you every possible scenario that involves use a of a chair.
Did you see the series of scenarios the GPT3 painted of ; "illustrate a baby Panda wearing a beanie looking at its reflection in a mirror".
Goto 2:44 in the video and consider the complexity of the request and the incredible creativeness of the illustrations.
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Yet you can change certain pixels and fool it completely. Understanding what a chair is, is different from pulling data from various sources. It can write that a chair is used to sit on, but does it really understand the concept of sitting? It can draw a person sitting but does it really understand the relief associated with it? It can say that a person was relieved by sitting down after a hard days work, but does it really understand the concept of a hard days work, and most importantly does it still understand that in relation to the chair? I think not. We can go further down as well, as far as you want, the AI will soon forget that it was even a chair that it was trying to understand because it has limited parallellism. So no, it doesn't understand what a chair is. It doesn't have the capacity. It might gain the capacity, and maybe we are on the right track in a limited sense, but something more is required. A human brain hasn't trained only in a human lifetime, in fact, the brain is a consequence of training for millions of years through evolution slowly adjusting the pathways and compartments of the brain. We need something more than just a stiff gridlike network. The grid itself has to be adjusted, and we need different compartments working together as a whole. Who knows what fine-tuning is needed to actually achieve true consciousness? Or true understanding?

BTW, have you checked out Dall-E Mini, the text to image converter? Really cool stuff, but not really a representation of the current state of AI, which hasn't been released yet to the public because of obvious illegal risks associated with it.
 
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