Yeah - huh.
Yeah I have found better luck breaking the facets down and defining each state on a one single string that is everything.
Unconscious (matter that reacts) > subconscious (biological life that reproduces by instinct)> consciousness (life that may view the other two and make choice rather than succumb to instinct, ability to respond than to act out of pure instinct)
As a conscious branch we can look back and view all states of consciousness in a way that the subconscious or unconscious facets can’t. They are evolving themselves though and potentially could reach a conscious state eventually, like planet of the apes lol.
These things that “mind” is able to evaluate and or contain from consciousness is due to us being on that very same string as everything else.
It is partially why we have all three inner workings, why we have an unconscious, subconscious and conscious. Similarly how we are integrated with and attached to chaos/order naturally.
That seems compatible with your thought on evolving consciousness, which in the phenomenal world or nature seems to be the case. I’ve been considering reading a book by Neumann on the subject. “ The origins and history of consciousness” Jung said he wished he had written it. Have you read it?
I haven’t, I have mainly read a few of Jung’s books and some repairing psychological trauma books as well as the five love languages and a few others.
I have heard the name Neumann but haven’t looked into his works. I don’t really have any academic study, mainly just independent study. It was this site I came to 10 years ago (with ideas I’d look back on now and think “How naive”) This site and the discussions here kind of woke me up in a sense and it’s been a journey of learning and attempting understanding reality and how we relate to it.
I’ll have to look into him as well if it touches on these types of concepts.
I started the book this morning. I’ve read a lot of Jung. I studied psychology at the undergraduate and masters level, but most of what I have learned has been on my own. College is mostly jumping through hoops for credentials in my experience.
felix: The only reasoning I’ve heard of there is that if you achieve high enough level of complexity, consciousness will accidentally occur.
I’ve never quite understood this. Are they saying consciousness rises above the laws of nature–as if just below a critical mass of complexity, the system follows natural laws just as any physical phenomenon, but as soon as it breaks through that critical mass, consciousness emerges and now the system can behave as if it is aware of it’s environment–avoiding threats to its existence, for example, or remembering things it experiences–even though there was never any physical infrastructure there to support memory or avoidance behavior. If the addition of such infrastructure is what counts as that extra bit of complexity that allows consciousness to emerge, then the explanation is not complexity per se but simply having all the infrastructure necessary for the system to behave as though it were conscious–either that, or they’re saying the emergence of consciousness allows the system to do things that the laws of nature alone would be insufficient to allow, effectively saying the system can now violate the laws of nature (like it has free will).
felix: As I understand it, AI is not being designed to be conscious since the designers wouldn’t know where to begin to do that.
So, if AI does become conscious it will be as the result of an accident. The hypothesis there seems to be that consciousness is the accidental result of some level of intelligence.
Or a result of consciousness already being there, and the specifics of the design determining the specifics of the form the consciousness takes. I think AI engineers could very well build a consciousness that mimics human consciousness.
Itchy: But imagine you could tap in to the nervous system of the entire universe. Assuming it has one.
Itchy: I said that from what I understand that’s not what the AI developers are trying to do so if it happens, it will be the result of them stumbling on it.
I don’t think AI developers are making any assumptions about how consciousness is designed; at least with the chatGPT approach, they seem to be trying to develop algorithms that behave as though they were consciousness. So long as they can get it to behave as though it were conscious, then the system allegedly is conscious (the Turing test). What goes on under the hood is neither here nor there.
PZR: Well, if there is a protoconsciousness, which then is not consciousness…
What is protoconsciousness anyhoo? I imagine consciousness to be a first-person phenomenon (without necessarily the person), and non-consciousness to be a third-person phenomenon. What kind of thing fits between those two? Don’t say second-person because that refers to “you”. You are not protoconsciousness.
Itchy: Just because our understanding is limited doesn’t mean there isn’t the sort of understanding that is not limited…as ours is… but only … to all Being.
I agree, but “understanding” can only be a metaphor… a being that experiences all would not have understanding, but it could have something similar (maybe superior). Understanding belongs to humans who need thought in order to relate to the world.
felix: “Penrose’s theory proposes that each gravity-induced collapse causes a little blip of proto-consciousness. These micro-events get organized by biological structures called microtubules inside our brains into full-bodied awareness.”
Interestingly, the full theory (called quantum consciousness) is the brain child of both Penrose and Stuart Hameroff. Penrose linked consciousness to these brief moments of quantum superposition and their collapse, whereas Hameroff brought it into the human brain with microtubules. The reasoning is that the indeterminacy of quantum collapse mimics that of free will, and microtubules are sort of “free will amplifiers” if you will. I think this is a worthwhile theory but Penrose and Hameroff want to pull the whole kit and caboodle of consciousness into quantum indeterminacy, which includes not only free will but qualia. Hameroff says the seeming connection between qualia to reality itself must have something to do with these qualia being baked into the structure of physics itself. But I only see free will having such a connection in the context of their theory. I think quantum consciousness is an excellent theory as far as free will is concerned but bankrupt of explanatory power when it comes to quality. My theory comes in just the opposite… a good theory of qualia but lacking in its ability to explain free will. The marriage of my theory with Penrose’s and Hameroff’s is a perfect compromise, but there are alternative ways to square my theory with quantum indeterminism and I go into a few in my book.
I agree. Consciousness is the foundational level upon which everything else rests.
Astounding and trivially obvious once you think about it. The consciousness that we fundamentally are is what we are “on the inside”, what we are from the first persona perspective. Our bodies are what we are on the outside, what we are from the third person perspective. But the third person perspective consistently hides what’s on the inside whereas the first person perspective is the inside, fully exposed so to speak. This is why I find Kant such an appropriate analogy here. Whereas the brain is a thid person object, our inner mental life is what the brain is “in itself”–what it really is. It’s the only of Kant’s noumena that we can know directly and intimately. This is not to say that the brain as it appears from outside observers is illusory but that consciousness is in an ongoing process of expressing itself in different forms, and when it comes to human beings, our mind express themselves in physical form–as a third person entity–that get filtered through our senses as a brain.
Is that the case? I wouldn’t say we all know that once you kill yourself it’s all over. According to my theory, consciousness goes on no matter what happens to our body. Whether our “self” as we know it continues is a different matter but experience goes on.
Yep… and Felix.
I disagree. Consciousness–the human form of soncsciousness–evolves for sure–but not as a series of consciousness layers being stack on top of each other (although that does happen) but as simple consciousness to more complex consciousness, of consciousness of only a few simple things to one of a world of immense complexity and diversity of different qualities and phenomena. Each stage is not “less” consciousness than it’s successors but consciousness of a narrow and specific set of things. The more consciousness evolves (again, human consciousness), the more “other” forms of consciousness get tacked and, other forms whose unique function is to be conscious of very specific and unique things (like color perception–not always a part of the consciousness of a nematode, for example, but eventually “tacked onto” more evolved beings like human).
Well, I got through 100 replies. Hope to get through 100 more next time, but don’t hold your breath.
Feel free to let me know if there were any highlights that you would like me to address and I will do my best.
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Consciousness now as we have it evolves on its own because we have the choice due to the consciousness to learn and grow, I am talking about the precursor to consciousness in reality for consciousness to spawn in the first place.
I’m referring to how Point A. (Matter/elements) got to Point B. (Consciousness in biological life)
Consciousness is a staircase without humans existing, which is how we grew into being conscious in the first place, there is a set of precursors to us getting to this state of where we are now, similarly to how there was in genealogy and species for the body to grow complex enough to host it in its higher form. Our becoming conscious is our ability to look back at the chain of which we evolved from both in conscious being and physically. Just consciousness overall as a one thing, perceiving itself as multiplicity.
I am stating that if consciousness formed solely in the brain then there would be a lot of issues with the model due to the fact that there would have been no evolutionary state, which an evolutionary state presents itself by observing nature with the very conscious being we got from that state of evolving.
I view everything as living just on different levels of conscious being and I define those different layers. We do have an unconscious and a subconscious, how would those come into play if they do not exist as facets in reality already?
I agree completely.
There’s stuff we don’t know about ourselves on the inside. Other people can see it more clearly because the body has tells the ego does not necessarily control.
One way the inside is shown on the outside is in our actions. Or lack of action. Which is an action (one we may not even be aware of, but which tells the other person information about ourselves and what we do or do not know).
Of course …you made me say that.
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Maybe you distinguish between mind and consciousness correctly, but if so, it contradicts what you just said in this quote. Maybe mind is what can assess what level of consciousness we are at. A moment ago (before my coffee kicked in) I was really fuzzyheaded, but I could not have evaluated that if I was actually fuzzyheadedness. I = mind.
I don’t like distinguishing between consciousness and mind. But if I had to, I would say that mind equals full on light, and “levels of consciousness” is all the varying gradients of the rainbow.
There is no contradiction. On the level of dualistic waking experience, mind is object, consciousness is subject. Body and world are mind. Mind appears to consciousness which projects it. Such ideas we have of consciousness are mental objects. The Ding an sich that we ultimately are knows all and is all and is forever unknown.
It’s analogous to a dream in which the sleeping self is everything but is unaware of being the dreamer that they really are. The dreamer is not just the self they think they are in the dream. They are everybody else and the total environment of the dream.
Consciousness is the whole kit and kaboodle of reality. Why it is that we decided to dazzle ourselves with multiplicity this way is a mystery.
But not everybody agrees on the terminology. The language of Advaita Vedanta works best for me but most of Western philosophy conflates mind and consciousness. I’ll try to work with whatever is presented.
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And except where the dreamer in the dream knows it’s just a dream, that makes it not less unreal, or not within the dream, hence what else it could be : the dreamer.
Which makes the dream ever more real. Then more than just a dream?
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How many turtles must take to underscore a dream within, then to prove that such need for grounding them could prove they really exist?
Countless. Just guessing, absurdly countless.
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Wait I forgot🥹
This is the void in which all points of conception emanate from, irreversibly in apparent one way directions, parallel except at the very end they sharply turn inwards into the same common point, as does eternal recurrence prefigure it.
The same beat that the beating of the heart is in synch with.
Only fearlessness can sustain it towards its indefinitely infinite variable progression.
We make jokes in the universe because we’re all so insanely bored.
We pick random people to be god. We have to follow all their rules. Etc…
Sometimes it’s horrific for everyone.
I’m retired god. Ask me anything.
The random god who is chosen. Unbeknownst to them is simply for comedy. They may be god for a trillion years. Since we all live forever, it’s not that big of a deal.
…
Wish that was true for those who barely can look in, that presume the inverse, that singularity is mere an illusive outcrop of what others take to see backwardly, and try to defy that premise, then the consequences become tediously hideous , and even barbaric.
Then the true meaning of whass going on become unbecoming front and center,
In a scene like that , the first implode is to cut out, except no exit and all…
Just saying
Yes, “more than just a dream”, as a wave in the ocean is more than just a wave. It’s the ocean.