How did consciousness manifest?

valich said:
No I do not believe that according to my logic robots or AI have a consciousness. My posting explained one way that memory can be engrained in the brain by the repitition of neurons to form solidified neuron channel activity. I said that I was leaning more toward Humphrey's view that this might lead to an "inward encumbrance" given the size, complexity and sophistication of our brain. But yes, I do believe in a mechanistic view and I believe that Einsten did too. This is why I am confused why you posted the following quote from Einstein:



I think this quote supports what I am saying and Einstein is professing a mechanistic view by equating conscious and the brain via matter. To restate this quote more clearly, Einstein is stating that he believes the mind is immortal in the same sense as the body is immortal. In other words, neither are immortal, because the body eventually dies. Then he is saying that it is difficult to doubt that the body and consciousness are connected with matter. In other words, isn't he stating that the body and consciousness ARE connected by matter? Because it is difficult to doubt the capacity of this?

To be perfectly honest, I really don't know. And I'll have to read two more pages of this thread to catch up with these excellent postings and arguments.
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If the mind is not immortal, what the hell is language? What is a meme? Why do words have immortality? As long as there are conscious minds to interpret the codes, the images, the words or the sounds, the immortality of the mind exists, and I'm talking about the universal mind. There is no way to really kill the universal mind, only seperate bodies. Just like there is no way to kill the roach mind, only individual roaches.
 
I think there is a level of conciousness which merely means 'awake' and responsive to the environment, participating in 'life' and then there is a level of consciousness which allows us 'humans' to seperate ourselves from that activity.

It allows us to seperate ourselves from the activity of routinely participating in life via day dreaming or meditating. A state in which we cannot hear or see, as we are 'divorced' momentarily to the information rec'd still by our senses.

This is a level of consciousness which is not held (IMO) by animals and which seperates us from them. We are engaged in life but we are able to divorce from it, we are able to divorce ourselves from our bodies. In sensory deprivation experiments what experience would an animal have mentally if any? We humans have many as the 'mind' appears to float free.

Though that said, cats and dogs appear to dream, what thus is enabling them to do so. To 'experience' a world beyond that which is real. Surely a function of consciousness that cannot be explained easily by biology. What is the need, the purpose of dreaming while asleep, especially when not necc, recalled by the waking organism? Humans dreams are largely full of symbolism when reflecting their emotional state, daytime fears and anxieties are greatly exagerated and take on unusual form in dreams. ie, a person afraid of being exposed, feeling vulnerable, may dream they are naked and walking around in public. A strange way of organising information and input.
An unusual ability to do so. A remarkable level of consciousness.

Robots will never possess the 'I' factor and re the chap with the bionic arm, certainly not any level of consciousness required to overtake humans in his life time.

Re labotomy's, I have read that the brain halves are able to take on the duties of the other when half or part when removed. I guess this does not apply to all though, hence the confusion.
 
valich said:
Spurious: As you can probably tell, I am very perplexed by this topic and I do apologize for being so strict in my reply, but I believe there is a huge gap-jump between robotic "awareness" and "biological consciousness," although I think I see your point. And I do see awareness in AI, but not consciousness?

You were right earlier by commenting on my limited understanding of evolution. But don't we all? I now have seven courses in biology, and all had a focus on evolution, especially the Comparative Vertabrate Anatomy course that I took that seemed more geared toward paleontology and cladistics than anatomy. However, I also have a degree in philosophy, majoring in Phenomenology, especially with an analyses of Husserl's conception of time counsciousness. I kind of went off into the deep end on this where my advisor finally pulled me out, basically telling me that that's enough.

I would argue vehemently against a spiritual, supernatural, God-oriented aspect of consciousness, so I hope this thread does not go into that deadend circular route. We must view consciousness as a continuous progression in evolution of species to where we are right now!
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You are consciousness, you aren't "the species", or "biological" because every word, every thought, every action, goes into the continuim. You may not believe in God, but you are consciousness and your body comes and goes. Einstien was wrong, people bodies die, their thoughts and actions don't.
Do you think Nazism died with Hitler? No, it did not.

The brain just contains and stores memories. With our computers we can now store memories outside of the brain. So why is the brain important? The only thing that matters are your thoughts, because your body can be rebuilt into a computer. It's simply, consciousness is God, when you lose it, existance is gone. You don't like the idea of a God? Consciousness is you, when you lose it, you cease to exist. If the universe loses consciousness, it does not exist. The good news is, consciousness never ends, it's a cosmic force. It's ranked higher than the brain because it's not unique to the human brain. It's not unique to our species, as if our species didn't exist, we would still exist in another species as aliens. We are conscious energy and thats it.
 
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valich said:
To sidetrack a little bit, do you know about the scientist that is actively implanting computer chips into his brain and is now considered to be the world's first bionic man? He is doing this, so he says, in preparation for the day when robots with advanced AI might take over the world. Each one-millimeter chip implant has some 50,000 transistors and 3,000 or so capacitors. He is able to transmit signals from his brain over the internet as he moves his hand to activate the same function in a robotic hand halfway around the world.

Yes, I agree with you. Scientists are trying to bridge this gap, but will they? Nevertheless, it is not the same as human consciousness, and my position is that we are hardwired through our extensive neuron-axon network, and this and this alone is responsible for human consciousness. And how can that be duplicated in a AI? You can copy and imitate it but.....well, I don't know.

Perplexity: I need to apologize. Posting the analogous articles about zombies adds fruit to this thread's discussion forum and gives us more to think about and consider.

Now, back to what I think. As was posted before:


I don't have any problem understanding consciousness from a purely mechanistic point-of-view like the above. The cerebrum is the "seat of intelligence." Through the extensive neural network of billions of neurons in the reticular formations (the net) that extends from parts of the brainstem, through the thalamus, relaying them on to the cerebral cortex, we have a conscious awareness of the activities of the aforementioned functions by way of the cerebrum's somatosensory association area that integrates it all together to give us a thought process. This also gives us memory and consciousness. Consciousness can evolve much in the same way as evolution has evolved us from simple prokaryotes to homo sapiens.

In the brain stem, the reticular formations in the medulla oblongonta, the pons, the midbrain and the diencephalon relay motor and sensory impulses and these impulses function in consciousness and arousal. We know this from CAT, PET and MRI scans and the wavelengths, particularly the beta waves that show the mental activities, by EEGs (electroencephalograms). There are primary impulse input areas and secondary sensory association areas and the cerebral cortex's "common integrative area" puts it all together to form thoughts and consciousness. I have absolutely no problem understanding multiple levels of consciousness this way.

Basic "perceptions" of touch-feeling, temperature sensations, and pain are already percepted in the thalamus even before the impulses are relayed to the cerebrum. The cerebrum consists of folded layers. Conceptionally, I have no problem imagining that the inner white matter integrates all these perceptions, while the much larger outer layers of gray matter surrounding it acts as consciousness - layer upon layer: consciousness upon consciousness This is how the brain increases during embryonic development, and consciousness increases too.

It would be interesting to know if a person who had a lobotomy still had as much consciousness as before he had the lobotomy. I would think not. I would think that after a lobotomy it would be more difficult to integrate the whole from the seperated left and right hemispheres than when they were connected together, and isn't this what we found to have happened to the people who had lobotomies in the 50's for serious mental problems?
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I don't think there is enough time for us to wait for consciousness to evolve. We either evolve our consciousness soon, or we will destroy ourselves. Don't you see, it's always been that we had complete control over our evolution, our environment and the entire universe. We (consciousnes), created everything so it makes perfect sense if we can control everything now.
 
Theoryofrelativity said:
There is a huge gap, but scientists are trying to bridge it, unless this is what you already are aware of. The question is will they? If they do, we are fucked! Who builds a superior 'being' to themselves and survives it? Hasn't anyone watched Robocop! :eek:

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/consciousness-submit/consciousness-submit.html

"Making Robots Conscious of their Mental States

John McCarthy

Computer Science Department
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
jmc@cs.stanford.edu


Abstract:
In AI, consciousness of self consists in a program having certain kinds of facts about its own mental processes and state of mind.
We discuss what consciousness of its own mental structures a robot will need in order to operate in the common sense world and accomplish the tasks humans will give it. It's quite a lot.

Many features of human consciousness will be wanted, some will not, and some abilities not possessed by humans will be found feasible and useful.

We give preliminary fragments of a logical language a robot can use to represent information about its own state of mind.

A robot will often have to conclude that it cannot decide a question on the basis of the information in memory and therefore must seek information externally. Gödel's idea of relative consistency is used to formalize non-knowledge.

Programs with the level of consciousness discussed in this article do not yet exist.

Thinking about consciousness with a view to designing it provides a new approach to some of the problems of consciousness studied by philosophers. The advantage is that it focusses on the aspects of consciousness important for intelligent behavior."
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I agree, whoever came up with the idea of robotics must have been the most self hating person imagineable. And how exactly are people motivated to build their replacement? If we have robots, well, humans are a dead species for sure.

Luckly, Robots arent conscious because if they were they'd quickly kill us and take over the earth, and it would be perfectly rational because we are the most destructive species on the earth.
 
I think consciousness is so interwoven with reality (even a basic particle needs to aware of itself and its relationship to the stuff that it isnt) that to ask how consciousness manifested is about the same as asking how the universe manifested - which i honestly have no idea. :D
 
heliocentric said:
I think consciousness is so interwoven with reality (even a basic particle needs to aware of itself and its relationship to the stuff that it isnt) that to ask how consciousness manifested is about the same as asking how the universe manifested - which i honestly have no idea. :D
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well it just did, so that's the answer to that question,

with regards to the origin of life on Earth, a space creature evolved and a single 'fagment' of its DNA found it's way to earth and so began the process of biological evolution on Earth.
 
Theoryofrelativity said:
with regards to the origin of life on Earth, a space creature evolved and a single 'fagment' of its DNA found it's way to earth and so began the process of biological evolution on Earth.
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That doesn't explain anything. How did the 'space creature' come about?
 
Heli, I just found this, it's rather old though.

"new frontiers: origins
Life from Space: An Emerging Paradigm
By N. Chandra Wickramasinghe
An ActionBioscience.org original article

articlehighlights
The author proposes a controversial idea that life on Earth came from outer space, since:
* microorganisms arrived on comets that crashed to prebiotic Earth
* early Earth did not have ideal conditions to produce life on its own
* comets continue to seed Earth with microorganisms that interact with existing species "
 
This is a scientific forum and our hypotheses should be based on some type of objective facts, rather than just wild speculation. Life from Space: An Emerging Paradigm is just one of many possible hypotheses that could - possibly - explain the origin of life, but this topic belongs on another thread, and I'm not saying that this is wild speculation but the below is.

In trying to explain how consciousness manifests itself, which is the subject of this thread, you can't just come out and say: "consciousness is the universe" or "consciousness is God." Even if you believe in God, this statement is more in the realm of religion than science; and the former - "consciousness is the universe" - is in the realm of philosophy, and I know of no philosopher who ever professed or proclaimed such a view. Either way, none of these statements have any factual basis in objective reality.

Just trying to keep the discussion more focused and on track.
 
perplexity said:
To the contrary, it was always obvious to me that every one of us lives in a World of our own, that what we call "truth" or "reality" is nothing more than a conveniently supposed common denominator of different experiences , with meaningfully common factors, sure enough, but differently perceived.

Science arrogantly presupposes a common Universe, a single set of phenomena to exist independently of human consciousness, but I have yet to see anything at all to prove to me that the Universe would in fact continue independently, beyond the extinction of mankind.

--- Ron.
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interesting and possibly I am in agreement,
 
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heliocentric said:
I think consciousness is so interwoven with reality (even a basic particle needs to aware of itself and its relationship to the stuff that it isnt) that to ask how consciousness manifested is about the same as asking how the universe manifested - which i honestly have no idea. :D
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Consciousness is reality, there is no reality outside of it. That's the point. Perception is reality, and without perception reality does not exist.
 
spuriousmonkey said:
That doesn't explain anything. How did the 'space creature' come about?
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The big bang, energy. We are energy, your brain has electricity in it, and that is your self awareness, not your body. When you die, your energy simply goes into other things and your consciousness travels around until it's back in the sun again, and then goes into the plants and the cycle repeats until the time where it's in mammals again (whoever eats the plants), but in general consciousness flows just like energy.
 
valich said:
This is a scientific forum and our hypotheses should be based on some type of objective facts, rather than just wild speculation. Life from Space: An Emerging Paradigm is just one of many possible hypotheses that could - possibly - explain the origin of life, but this topic belongs on another thread, and I'm not saying that this is wild speculation but the below is.

In trying to explain how consciousness manifests itself, which is the subject of this thread, you can't just come out and say: "consciousness is the universe" or "consciousness is God." Even if you believe in God, this statement is more in the realm of religion than science; and the former - "consciousness is the universe" - is in the realm of philosophy, and I know of no philosopher who ever professed or proclaimed such a view. Either way, none of these statements have any factual basis in objective reality.

Just trying to keep the discussion more focused and on track.
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Fine, consciousness caused the big bang. Go research the science behind the big bang, and you'll see the big bang formed matter in the universe.

Consciousness is multi-dimensional, existing on all levels of size, in all dimensions. It's simple, matter is energy, and consciousness is energy, and the energy of conciousness manifests itself through control. Consciousness is like self aware electricity, if you want a precise science based definition. If you want proof, it's almost impossible to prove beyond a doubt what consciousness is, all I can say is when it manifested and perhaps how, as there are many hypothesis as to how. What consciousness is, in a material sense is undefinable because there is no proof that consciousness is material. Yes the brain is conscious, but the brain is not conscious when there is no blood flow or electric flow in it, meaning consciousness might not even exist in the brain. Reality might not exist in the brain is what I'm saying. Plants don't have brains but they do have some type of consciousness, even if its a blind 2d consciousness, they know to follow the sun. The sun seems to provide energy which seems to be how consciousness is given and taken, in that the energy goes to the brain or to the body of the plant or any living thing allowing it to evolve a consciousness using that energy from the sun.
 
perplexity said:
In any case the trouble then would be that with the wide variety of understandings of "self", you thereby compound the issue instead of clarifying it.

--- Ron.
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so then is the thread about the arrival of the higher self-awareness of humans or about simple consciousness as far as the ability to respond to your environment?

:confused:
 
perplexity said:
Newton's apple responded to the environment when it fell from the tree.
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It was already responding to the environment before it fell. That's why there is a little twig holding the apple in place counteracting the environment.
 
The way I see it, awareness precedes consciousness, as awareness does not imply reflection, whereas IMO, consciousness does... but consciousness is "self-awareness".

There is apparently some facet of the universe that allows for the condition "alive".

Apparently once "alive", "alive" attempts via its very nature to remain so, at least at the aggregate.

I infer that this tendency is representative of the geometry of the universe. When certain (I don't know what exactly) conditions are met, the condition of life springs forth. The key geometrical significance IMO, is that life is the only way to a point of view. Life allows perspective. Nothing other than life relates to its environment in any form as far as I can construe.

With a perspective comes meaning, even in the most basic form of "seek light". The utterly simplistic "seek light" instinct of whatever bacteria or something, separates at the most basic level, "light" from "no light", even though "self-awareness" doesn't seem to be involved.

In this form "meaning" is IMO, extremely basic. It's pretty much unrecognizable from a human perspective but is imperative to me as a building block for self-awareness because it is the first place we can observe "idea space" or "the abstract" being utilized by or "connecting with" any material in the universe.

It is in idea space because there is differentiation of a form that has direct importance to the activities and survival of the life-form in question. It's that a POV exists and in the most basic sense (though lacking 2nd order awareness) - its stimulous means something to it - that clearly establishes (at least IMO) a minimalistic connection to idea space. It's a demonstration of principle.

So anyway, self-awareness manifested from all that, and billion of years for the "life force" (if you will) to push forward. From a purely geometrical perspective, I often hypothesize that occurences of self-awareness, and their increasing numbers is basically space-time in the classical sense, bleeding into idea-space - which leads me to the conclusion that idea-space is a fundamental facet of the universe - in addition to and integrated with space-time.

Or something like that.
 
Responding to one's environment does not require consciousness as this is often nothing more than simple stimulus-response action without any cognitive thought.

Consciousness evolves as the mind grows - and as the brain evolved from species to species - and as it accumulates knowledge of the environment. For example, when I was a baby, I first became conscious of my legs and the ability that I had to walk. Later, after I learned how to walk, this action no longer required my being conscious of walking: it became an activity that I could perform with unconscious thought that then allowed me to focus my conscious around me to where I was walking. Yet I can now say that I am conscious that I am conscious of my walking ability. Thus my consciousness is now expanded and can be said to encompass a heirachy of levels: primary awareness, secondary consciousness, tertiary, etc. Learning how to drive a car is a similar experience. You first are conscious of where you place your limbs to articulate the movement of the vehicle, then later no consciousness is required. You can the focus your consciousness on the road. Later, after you drive back-and-forth to work everyday along the same route, you are no longer conscious even of the road - until some sudden disturbance in the activity arises that forces you to brake - and then you can focus your consciousness on what your going to do at work, yet you are still aware of the surrounding traffic and the road: primary awareness/consciousness, secondary, tertiary consciousness, ad infinitum.
 
valich said:
Responding to one's environment does not require consciousness as this is often nothing more than simple stimulus-response action without any cognitive thought.

Consciousness evolves as the mind grows - and as the brain evolved from species to species - and as it accumulates knowledge of the environment. For example, when I was a baby, I first became conscious of my legs and the ability that I had to walk. Later, after I learned how to walk, this action no longer required my being conscious of walking: it became an activity that I could perform with unconscious thought that then allowed me to focus my conscious around me to where I was walking. Yet I can now say that I am conscious that I am conscious of my walking ability. Thus my consciousness is now expanded and can be said to encompass a heirachy of levels: primary awareness, secondary consciousness, tertiary, etc. Learning how to drive a car is a similar experience. You first are conscious of where you place your limbs to articulate the movement of the vehicle, then later no consciousness is required. You can the focus your consciousness on the road. Later, after you drive back-and-forth to work everyday along the same route, you are no longer conscious even of the road - until some sudden disturbance in the activity arises that forces you to brake - and then you can focus your consciousness on what your going to do at work, yet you are still aware of the surrounding traffic and the road: primary awareness/consciousness, secondary, tertiary consciousness, ad infinitum.
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it's quite interesting really, the way that 'consciousness' actually hinders the process of thought

Thinking withouth 'thinking' usually produces better and quicker results.
Consider the way a sevant with math ability operates, they solve math problems without knowing how, though that is not strictly true.tThey merely do NOT know 'how' consciously.

When we learn something on a conscious level, we become mildly aware of the subconscious process (or we create a new one) for solving that problem, yet the prescence of that conscious thought seems to reduce the ability to reach more rapid and accurate results. The conscious mind believes it is problem solving when really it is just taking a fast process, slowing it down and fucking it all up. This is why meditation seems to prove useful in problem solving.

Do you understand what I mean by this?

If you do then please elaborate :)
 
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