ToR original
Registered Member
What has changed with viewpoints on this topic in the past 18yrs I wonder?
How did consciousness manifest?
- Thread starter Theoryofrelativity
- Start date
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Do you? That’s nice.
How did consciousness manifest?
Hand up... Me Me... I have it narrowed down to 2 possibilities:::
1. The process of evolution.!!!
2. Supernaturally.!!!
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Actually I think you are answering a rather different question, namely "How did consciousness arise?"
The question, though, is how it manifested, which I take to mean how did it become apparent. So that's more a question about what the first telltale signs of consciousness would be, as life developed. This is quite tricky, because I don't think it is at all clear how one can define consciousness in an unambiguous, or indeed a useful, manner.
For example, do we think a live lizard is conscious? It moves around, shows awareness of its surroundings, exhibits some decision-making capacity and so forth. If stops doing that if you deprive it of sufficient oxygen, at which point we would say it has "lost consciousness". So it is conscious in the sense of being able to sense and react to its surroundings.
But is a lizard conscious in the sense of being aware of its own thoughts, as in John Locke's conception of consciousness, i.e. having a sense of self? Almost certainly not - though how can we know?
Consciousness in the first sense is possessed to some degree by just about all animals, and even, in the broadest sense, by plants too. So it's a continuum, rather than being something that a properly functioning organism either has or doesn't have.
Consciousness in the second sense, i.e. a sense of self, is something internally perceived. I'm not at all sure there is any means of determining from outside whether it is present or not, unless you can converse with the organism through language capable of expressing abstract concepts. In practice that means we can only know for sure human beings have that form of consciousness. But we can't rule it out for other organisms that can't talk to us about it.