How does something become conscious? Everything in my room is inactive except for a pet bird. How did that bird become conscious?
Plants have photoreceptors that allow them to turn towards the light. It’s like that only a trillion trillion times more complex.
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When your pet bird responds by eating its food or turns its head to your cell phone sound, it is conscious for is not response to its environment or surroundings a function of consciousness? A table does not respond. The phone’s ringing is caused by a conscious person.
but my lamp isnt ever gonna become conscious…
You never know… it might get a bright idea or two.
“If the protein does something, participates in an attractor, then the information bears meaning. If there is no functional protein (no attractor), there is no meaning.”
– Irun R. Cohen
What exactly do we mean by “conscious”?
I think in ordinary usage, this term implies subjectivity: not just that the bird can be observed responding to its environment in meaningful, intelligent ways, but also that (we assume) the bird experiences what it is doing and what is going on around it, subjectively, from the inside. If one of you were watching me type this, the activity of typing would have two perspectives, one “from outside” (you watching me type it), and the other “from inside” (my own experience of the same thing). We assume that the bird has a “from inside” perspective as well.
A robot could be programmed to respond to its environment intelligently and meaningfully, but (we further assume) there is no “from inside” perspective going on in the robot’s case, only a “from outside.”
Now, several questions arise from this.
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How do we actually know that the bird has a “from inside” perspective and the robot doesn’t? What test can we perform to distinguish the two?
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Does intelligent and meaningful response to the environment actually have anything to do with consciousness, i.e., with having a “from inside” perspective? Or is that just something we assume, because we ourselves, as human beings, have a “from inside” perspective and we also respond intelligently and meaningfully to the environment?
Humans are intelligent, humans are conscious. Does that mean that intelligence and consciousness go together? Or is it just a coincidence?
In short, we have no way of knowing whether your desk lamp has a “from inside” perspective, i.e., whether or not it is conscious. We do know that it is not intelligent, but that may not be the same thing at all.
Obvious answer: By evolving. Becoming alive is a good start.
To be conciously aware off something?
For people it takes brain power and logic. A cause and effect that you are aware of.
For animals, it takes brain chemical actions. In animals, first hunger happens,… witch allows adrenaline to be associated with the next step through learning by watching. So then it becomes the section of the brain that has hunger, learns thought patterens in how to deal with it. It becomes precursers to the next section of the brain. It should be set up in such a way that a orphan animal will react to adrenaline when they are hungery. Animals aren’t any more then organic machines.
For us, desires are at the forefront of our concious awareness. What every they may be, it usually runs parrellel of,… love joy hope peace contentness.
PG,
I think you need to define what you mean be the word “conscious”.
A single cell amoeba controls it’s inner “self” by regulating the chemical composition of it constituent parts. It interracts with it’s immediate environment, taking in what is needed and expelling what it doesn’t. In this sense, the ability of interracting with the environment could be considered consciousness. I don’t think this is what you are asking.
We need a definition of that word if you’re to find satisfactory answers.
I’d say an ameba has biochemical impulses it merely reacts to. As for making a choice, it’s pretty limited toward???
Hi Phil,
But it is quite possible to define consciousness as the ability to discern and react to biochemical differences. I realize my example was extreme, but it was extreme to make the point that we need an arbitrary definition of consciousness before we can discuss what PG is asking - I think.
Consciousness is an aspect of spirituality.
Spirituality is a reference to the brain’s neuroclusters, “cities” that “light up” our ontologically described awareness and facilitate our epistemologically described experience-knowledge.
Our specialized brain cells, complete with full-body-cells support, packed so closely and integratively together, create a phenomenon called (for lack of a better word) inspiritualization, whereby we, as an organism, are endowed with our sense of oneness as a being: our spirit.
Life (these scores of trillions of cells) packed this integratively close together creates another life at the next level: the spiritual level.
The miracle of identity, that states no two pieces of existence are the same piece of existence, makes you you and nobody else.
Because the material creates the spiritual, then, with respect to the miracle of identity, our spirit is ephemerally mortal: when our body dies, so does our spirit … and, forever.
Consciousness is reaction….
Consciousness is the physical body awakening to itself through the other.
You’re assuming you’d know how to recognize consciousness when you see it. There is a view called “anamism” which states that everything has consciousness - even your phone or table or lamp. Having consciousness does not necessarily entail having things like “thoughts”, “emotions”, or even “sensations”. Why couldn’t there be a mind composed of mental items X, Y, and Z for which we have no way of conceptualizing. As mental items, they may drive the behavior of the physical body that carries them, but since they are nothing that we can imagine, the behavior should not look familiar to us at all - we would never guess it was the result of conscious experiences and reactions.
I like that concept a lot. However is it actually “animism”?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism
The assigning of human-centrism to “consciousness” reminds me of another of my favorites: anthropomorphism:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism
These concepts flesh out what I think is possibly THE major flaw in all philosophies.
I drive a forklift for a living, if you can call it that, but, I have lots of spare processor time in my biochemical computer. I’ve spent lots of time thinking about this crazy question, because I think more attention needs to be brought to it.
What is consciousness, and when does something become conscious? It’s a question no one wants to think about because of all the societal (spelling isn’t my strength) issues attached. If we seriously think about WHAT is consiousness, and when something is to be considered conscious, we will all look at our hamburgers differently. We will also know what standard to judge EXACTLY at which cell division a fetus would no longer be an abortion and become murder. Etc.
I think this is why you will not find a set of realistic answers to this question. It’s much easier to dance around it with flowery whatifery. We are all so detached from Reality it’s not funny.
I wish I had a Task Manager applet for my own brain.
“How does something become conscious? Everything in my room is inactive except for a pet bird. How did that bird become conscious?”
This is so complex it’s hard to contemplate, or even to begin where to contemplate. What are the basic premises?
I think in the traditional sense, we mean cognitive when we say conscious. I agree with some of what JennyHeart says in her post especially the bit about the trillions of cells and specialized nerves.
I am certain, personally, that our brain is a highly evolved biochemical computer. If you think about it, really, the human brain is just sitting there in some fluid, interpreting the data that is sent to it via our various organs. We don’t “see” anything, or “hear” anything, really, our brain is processing data and constructing our reality of that data stream.
In reality, I am a computer being carried about by a complex support system, as surely as an amoeaba eats and moves about and interacts with it’s environement.
Your bird, is conscious. Recent studies are finding that there is actually language in songbird songs. Your bird has a complex biochemical computer inside it’s skull just like you. I’ve seen a parrot doing math on Discovery and read about it in several magazines. I believe that most mammals are conscious creatures. Which makes me a bit uneasy at my carnivorous habits.
A lamp, if it is conscious, is experiencing a state of consciousness so alien to us that discussion of it is most likely pointless. We’d be better off trying to understand the hive consciousness of ants.
I think the solution to the abortion debate lies in the answer to this question.
You mean your brain???
MS Word says this is correct spelling.
Not so lucky with MS Word this time, but I like it.
It’s the only way to be.
Disorganized thoughts?