Consciousness: Why does it exist?

D

Dinosaur

Rational Skeptic
Valued Senior Member
Is consciousness merely a byproduct of a complex brain?

Consciousness might be necessary for the evolution of a complex brain.

Note that consciousness does not seem necssary for any human activity. It seems possible to (in the future) build a robot capable of most (if not all) human activity.

Even though Deep Blue played world class chess using number crunching rather than intelligence, it seems to indicate that high level mental activity is possible without consciousness.

It seems to me that all mammals have some level of consciousness. Proving this seems difficult, if not impossible. Intetraction with pets & squirrels (which I feed) makes be think that such mammals have consciousness. Chimps & other primates probably have consciousness.

I am convinced that others have consciousness only because I have it & do not consider myself to be so unique that I am the only one with it.
 
Consciousness is a threat detection and evasion mechanism. Most animals have it.
 
i was not aware the question was insulting.

i apologize.

I was not refering to the topic question, i was referring to the comment's of the topic
but the fact you were offended of it kind of says a lot.
 
Consciousness proves over everything else for me there is a creator. Why would animals evolve on some time frame to have this complex charactistic that most animals have.

I personally believe we tune into what evil is, or what we percieve to be evil. Microwaving a person prevents these brain receptors from working, so humans do not tune into what ever that is. So while being heavily mircowaved people do not comiit evil. Govs know this already. Low level microwaving the population stops alot of crimes and madness. To stop it all they could microwave us at higher levels, but that would give us perminant headaches, and the gov needs to make life livable. The gov just sends out low levels and are able to cope with having the crime levels they do.
So i think its far more complex than we know obviously the ptb do have alot of info on this, and do use it to run society.

So personally i think science has some idea that we do tune into what ever evil is, or an energy that makes us do what we percieve to be evil.

What Consciousness is above that, who knows, i far more complex, but i was just giving you an example, of high we tune into various things.

But then you have to ask is evil or what ever that stuff we tune into a reason for something more we do not know about?
 
andy1033 said:
Consciousness proofs over everything else for me there is a creator. Why would animals evolve on some time frame to have this complex charactistic that most animals have.

I personally believe we tune into what evil is, or what we percieve to be evil. Microwaving a person prevents these brain receptors from working, so humans do not tune into what ever that is. So while being heavily mircowaved people do not comiit evil. Govs know this already. Low level microwaving the population stops alot of crimes and madness. To stop it all they could microwave us at higher levels, but that would give us perminant headaches, and the gov needs to make life livable. The gov just sends out low levels and are able to cope with having the crime levels they do.
So i think its far more complex than we know obviously the ptb do have alot of info on this, and do use it to run society.

So personally i think science has some idea that we do tune into what ever evil is, or an energy that makes us do what we percieve to be evil.

What Consciousness is above that, who knows, i far more complex, but i was just giving you an example, of high we tune into various things.
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Another insane theist. Welcome!
 
spidergoat said:
Another insane theist. Welcome!
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Whether you like it or not the gov knows that microwaving anyone would stop them doing evil. The gov use this and the fact they do not tell the public, that they proved that evil exists, and we tune into it.

What ever your views, the gov knows this as a fact and they use this to control society as much as livably possible.
 
andy1033 said:
Whether you like it or not the gov knows that microwaving anyone would stop them doing evil.
Click to expand...

Good point. I can honestly say that everything that I have ever gotten out of the microwave oven was NOT evil. I have burned popcorn which smells evil but I would not say that the burned popcorn itself was evil.

Plus if you had like a serial killer and you put him in a microwave oven on high for about an hour he would stop doing evil.

So I guess I am on board with your thoughts here.
 
andy1033 said:
Whether you like it or not the gov knows that microwaving anyone would stop them doing evil. The gov use this and the fact they do not tell the public, that they proved that evil exists, and we tune into it.

What ever your views, the gov knows this as a fact and they use this to control society as much as livably possible.
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I know! It will stop them from doing lots of other things too, like breathing.

Have you tried aluminum foil?
 
andy1033 said:
Whether you like it or not the gov knows that microwaving anyone would stop them doing evil. The gov use this and the fact they do not tell the public, that they proved that evil exists, and we tune into it.

What ever your views, the gov knows this as a fact and they use this to control society as much as livably possible.
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ummm, wow.

microwaving someone at high levels will radiate someone and possibly kill, not just remove evil.

and second, just because the government thinks evil exist(since they are religious based) does not me there's a such existence.
yes,
the government can be feeble, ignorant individuals as well.
and when that is majoritized......oh my..,
you end up with such nonsense that you just stated.

and also,

What ever your views, the gov knows this as a fact and they use this to control society as much as livably possible.
Click to expand...

if this were slightly true, then why has evil(as you put it) increased in the last few years of this decade ?
 
origin said:
Good point. I can honestly say that everything that I have ever gotten out of the microwave oven was NOT evil. I have burned popcorn which smells evil but I would not say that the burned popcorn itself was evil.

Plus if you had like a serial killer and you put him in a microwave oven on high for about an hour he would stop doing evil.

So I guess I am on board with your thoughts here.
Click to expand...


hilarious.
 
Dinosaur said:
Is consciousness merely a byproduct of a complex brain? Consciousness might be necessary for the evolution of a complex brain.
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I'd prefer "how" to "why". The universe isn't supposed to be equivalent to an omnipotent god, from the standpoint that it could just brutely conjure anything because some contended "need" for it arises in biological evolution. For instance, being to able to teleport from planet to planet across several light-years would be an extremely useful adaptation for the spread of complex life. However, another 500-600 million years could go by and it's still not going to arise among organisms because it is not an ability that can fall out of a non-artificial organization of basic physical components, or from the natural constraints restricting this world.

Experience (the latter referring to that "showing" of whatever content in vision, hearing, etc; and personal thoughts) has no precursor or more elemental stages, minus a brain. That is, in the most popular philosophical game sported in naturalism today, most of this cosmos is assumed to be utterly nonconscious (in the "manifested" sense) -- essentially what you "encounter" during dreamless sleep (i.e., nothingness).

There are precursor stages for the "easy problems of consciousness" to emerge from (referring to intelligence, memory, cognition, etc). There are artificial devices all over the place that can detect and identity what they were designed to detect and identify. This manner of what might be called "zombie consciousness" doesn't concern any "private manifestations of world or thought" and thus unremarkably is just more systemic interacting relationships between components. So arguably there is a universal, primitive level of those items (detection, memory, etc) extending to the bottom affairs of physics. The product of such "zombie consciousness" is just the behavior of a robot body navigating successfully through its environment; or if minus a body: Generating screen images, sounds, etc., from all those intricate microphysical interactions which inform the human utilizing the device. When minus how the device and its output is perceived by human or animal, it exists to itself as that non-experiential "nothingness" (again) which follows our death or preceded our brain development (the device performs its "conscious-like deeds" in the "dark", without an exhibited existence, so to speak).

One common explanation of experience (going back to Immanuel Kant) is that it results from cognition, that it does not outrun cognition as unpopular panexperientialism contends (qualitative events springing from all physical interactions). Ultimately, cognition seems to be an association to any number of things stored (memory) for use in identifying and understanding an incoming pattern of information. However, this supplies little satisfactory explanation for why the relationship between one batch of electrochemical activity (received "online" data) and another set of electrochemical activity ("stored" offline data) results in an astonishing brute novelty like experience (going from "nothingness" to "something" being exhibited). Since, again, in the context of anti-panexperiential materialism, physical interactions in general do not yield "showings" of anything, no matter how primitive or elemental compared to our own sophisticated experiences.
 
There seems to be a difference in intended meaning of the word "conciousness" as in "awareness" and "sapience". Animals have varying degrees of awareness, people are sapient. It is possible that some species currently listed as animals are in fact "people" of a different gene-pool.

And no, I don't think sapience is a direct product of complexity; an elephant has a marvelously complex brain. Rather, I think it is a SPECIFIC complexity, that which allows us to be aware of our own awareness, to see ourselves from the outside so to speak. We can provide ourselves with our very own different point of view. We call it our concience, but it is the other half of ourselves. And in fact I am not 100% certain that all homo-sapiens are in fact sapient.
 
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