Pigeons can remain alive and functional with ablated hemispheres;
they fly, eat, avoid obstacles, choose the path of least resistance, and so on, just like normal pigeons.
The lower centres seem to have an innate potential to act as “back-ups” to the hemispheres.
But once we get to more developed organisms, such as dogs, apes, and humans, the lower centres
appear to have less influence as replacement functionalities.
The more sophisticated the higher centres become, the less powerful the lower centres become.
This is interesting philosophically, because certain animals still possess a functioning consciousness, essentially, without brains.
My opinion is that consciousness is not merely limited to a correlation with the brain, but rather that a more dispersed co-relationship exists between the mind and body ( the spinal cord and downward ).
For more, check out the experiments done by Friedrich Goltz on dogs and monkeys.
Octopi have neurons in their tentacles such that they are semi independent from the brain, so perhaps the remaining nervous system acts like neurons? Just a thought.
Don’t know about ‘consciousness’ though, its similar to a lifeform without a brain? Probably reacts to environments like something with simple senses?
Jelly-fish don’t have brains at all, yet they appear, for all intensive purposes, to be subjective creatures - organisms with some level of awareness.
Octopi and J-fish are good sources of evidence against materialistic notions of consciousness.
Jellyfish have four neuron bundles and a simple orifice for an eye. The main thing is that neurons and nerve bundles are both mutli-switches [amongst other info exchanges], if you attach them to small simple remote vehicles they will drive them. They are ‘doing’ cells, and i assume that consciousness may occur whenever there is enough activity to produce information and act upon it [like a headless chicken bumping into a tree]. But at some point there is a chicken with and then without a head, the consciousness would if the head was kept alive, would remain to be the chickens consciousness. Then the body would start ‘acting’ like it has consciousness, but its only an act if consciousness isn’t produced. It may be so that consciousness of the chicken body is born in the moment the head was removed.
Take the case of conjoined twins who share a head/brain; the brain is being used by two people/consciousnesses, so during its growth it had mechanistically [subconsciously] judged its situation as having two bodies and therefore should have two centralisation calibration functions ~ consciousnesses. Either way we can imagine that there is a process by which consciousness arises. Then that the process is probably simple at base and when in early foetal stages.
Ergo;
So it probably don’t take much to produce rudimentary consciousnesses.
There is probably no specific divider between being conscious and not, in any living organism even of the simplest kind, and of the most complex.
that there is no divider between first life-forms and non-life? Which means there is no such thing as life, nor consciousness. Funny how people, light and music, occupies such domains! That we are contrarily alive and conscious.
I don’t agree with the above proposition; there are such things as life and consciousness.
Existence is characterized and defined by opposites. That there are consciousness and life, there are also non-consciousness and death.
The distinction between the two may not be the way most think, but it’s there.
At what point would you say a system is not conscious but a nervous system without consciousness? You cannot so we have to keep going with the idea that there are only increasingly complex nervous systems. Somehow the act of centralising info involved in the brains calibrations, is experienced, and it is that experience we call consciousness. Note that every aspect of the equation can be changed or duplicated.
What is the thingness of ‘life’/’aliveness’? ~ we will of course find a similar answer. There are varying degrees of animation, and once they cease to be purely cyclic, we call that life.
I would say at the inorganic level, that’s where experience ceases, actually; that’s not to say that inorganic matter doesn’t have some sort of non-conscious, latent, vital element - an animism. Organic life is the activation of the latent vitalism in matter. The inorganic and organic is the distinction.