Consciousness is not intelligience. Consciousness is simply existence. It is a soup of substance, mixtures and colors. You make a fallacy when you call it intelligience, because you are intentionally or unintentionally skewing the definition of a common ord, intellgience, to suit your ends. For example, a drugged zombie may have consciousness, but no intelligience, but not a pzombie. An intelligient robot may be a p-zombie ith no consciousness.
Consciousness is simple a soup of information. TVs are soups of information. We have no way of knowing if they are conscious, though they are probably not conscious and I dont want this to devolve into a discussion of panpsychism.
You make the fallacy of associating consciousness with intelligience, our body and brains, for all we know consciousness could be located elsehere and we are experiencing a simulation generated, by an intelligent person, who is no longer conscious. Essentially, we would not be experiencing intelligience directly, but rather an artist painting which is ordered. Thus, we would be sentient paintings, and the actual brain processes would be unconscious.
Genius with an iq 700 is a footsoldier. We are fighitng a war of information. I dont think you and me are on the same page. I am not presenting them as a gaurantee. Security gaurds are not a gaurantee you wont get robbed. They are simply a card to better our chances, pave the way so that one day we can discover the ultimate truth of what happens in the afterlife, what the afterlife entails, etc.
My definition of afterlife is what happens when your body dies. Either nothing happens, you rebirth, or go to some other realms or something bizzare.
As for disneyland, Id rather go to legoland actually.
I never said that consciousness and intelligence were or were not the same thing. All I did was point out that you haven’t explained how they are different (you haven’t DEFINED either term).
Now here you offer a somewhat definition of consciousness as “soup of information”. What is it about a soup of information that is consciousness? The fact that there are a lot of “informations” thrown together in a pile somehow makes consciousness? How? And what exactly is “information”?
You see, I’m looking for a bit more specific and developed ideas from you.
Ok. Consciousness is, quite simply, a soup of information because it looks like a soup. I am mostly talking about visual consciousness, since I dont understand other qualia 100 percent yet. When our visual content is empty, we are then filled with thoughts, and subconscious barely audible processes. When someone meditates they are still conscious, so we must assume that there are subconscious barely audio processes going on keeping them conscious.
There is no such thing as free will, therefore intelligience is an illusion. Intelligience is said to be the relative complexity of ones environment vs. ordering. If a conscious environment can order its environment in a way to be aesthetically pleasing to itself, it is said to be intelligient.
thus, women have a rudimentary intelligence for dolling themselves up, and men, seeing as they have ugly bodies, do not spend time at the mirror and have a intelligience for creating beautiful works and machines.
Thus, it all boils down to aesthetics. Heaven is an aesthetically pleasing outcome, and so the highest intelligence ill seek to go to it, it is logical and rational. The highest intelligence will reject religious faith because intelligience can quickly assemble components into paths and trajectories. Religion produces a confused trajectory, there is no evidence and needed components cannot be found and assembled. The highest intelligence leaves little to chance, it would not rebirth into a world of low aesthetics if it could help it. Pain is a form of low aesthetics, only fools and nihilists dont care if they go to a bad place. However, reasonable intelligiences know that religions are not probably true, so the percieved risk of damnation is very low. Yet, they do not have blind faith into atheist delusions of nothingness either. It becomes not just a matter of aesthetics, but truth for truths sake. Only a fool and total nihilist would not care what quality of life, if any, awaits them on the other side.
So intelligience, is a memory of mechanisms, and ordering of mechanisms to maximize utility, genius is the beauty component. Mechanisms= truth of truths sake and Genius=truth for beautys sake.
Great thank you for clarifying. So consciousness is a soup of small ‘bits’ of data/information such as occurs in our visual field, and you’re saying that all the five senses are like this, soups of bits of information/quantities… and add those five soups together and you get consciousness itself as a whole?
My issue with this is how it reduces consciousness to perception and sensation. As you say if we stop seeing things then we have thoughts, there is an active “inner world” of activity only part of which is based on perceptions and sensations.
To me it seems like you’re describing the physical body and its many senses, as if this were consciousness, against which you posit mechanical intelligence and memory. Essentially you’re probably right in how you break it down, but I use the term consciousness to include all of this stuff, the physical sensations and feelings, perceptions and images in the ‘mind’s eye’, applying logic and mechanical thinking to solve problems, social codes we follow and morals we adopt or are forced to conform to, and of course memory/recollection which is a huge basis for consciousness since we are constantly drawing contents from past experiences into the present moment of consciousness in order to make syntheses and new ideas/new experiences.
I don’t degrade intelligence in the way you do, because I see intelligence as just one more component of overall consciousness. It is hierarchical and categorical, like Russian dolls or like Venn diagrams in 3D; many different processes and parts somewhat independent and somewhat intertwined. For example we can’t simply reduce mechanical intelligence to logic learned or innate, it also involves perception and learning how to perceive what is meaningful and what can be extracted from rote sensation to become an object of awareness and thus participate in a conscious or intelligent process, likewise language plays a huge role in this also. There is animal-instinct level intelligence and mechanics, also intuition and feelings, larger emotions, concepts and logical relations of reasoning, all of these web together in terms of degrees and orders of meaning, cause and effect.
In terms of free will, freedom does exist for consciousness and in fact we can “rank” different species and individual consciousnesses in terms of their possession of relative degrees of freedom; “freedom” means the capability to act contrary to something that would otherwise have been compulsory and not able to be acted contrary to. Freedom isn’t about the metaphysical-religious notion of non-determined or non-caused action, that is absurd.
Your post is convuluted and Im not sure I fully understand what you are saying, nor I am sure if it is in my best interest for me to.
I will address it like this, the I does not exist, I look at a cat the cat is part of Me and My consciousness. We “are” our bodies because whenever we encounter a mirror instance our bodies appear. Therefore we are not cats, because we serve and obey mirrors, mirrors do not show us cats and show us our bodies.
We generally associate our thoughts as our “selves” but really our thoughts are random and generally varied. Therefore self is more like our memories not our thoughts.
Intelligence, is the process of making choices and remembering chains of information, to make higher ordered things. If a man cannot put a triangle into a triangle hole we say he is either being uncooperative or unintelligient. He is unintelligient because he cannot remember chains of information to make higher ordered things. Intelligence is not the same as perception, a pzombie does not have conscious perception, the word perception must mean unconscious sensory input/output in that regard.
It is unclear if intelligience is required for consciousness. There is no such thing as freewill and after that all other things become fuzzy as well. If for example, a great intelligent painter made a trillion^2 painting with trillions of frames, and attached a recorded audio to those frames…and he died. If a camera arose 1000 years later, watching and hearing every frame of the movie…which was a prerecorded movie showing the life of a mathematician…if the camera was conscious he would feel like a conscious, intelligient mathematician. But clearly the camera is not intelligient, and neither is the movie…they are simply prerecorded frames. When you look at life this way, definitions begin to crumble and disentegrate before your very eyes. Answers are not so easily answered.
Consciousness is to be conscious of something, which means to be in a state of relation and response, to be able to be impressed-upon by that which we are conscious of. Humans are conscious of countless things at once, at many different layers and as I said it is hierarchical, i.e. certain things or layers subsume others or are subsumed themselves, etc. The conditions are complex for any thing because of constant entwinement.
Consciousness is simply the fact of being present to something and that “something” is precisely the object or the content of that conscious act. There are changes and responses (effects) in us that result from our presencing things before ourselves (causes), and therefore we become conscious of not just the object itself but also of our reactions to the object; and so on and so on, recursively since every reaction engenders another step of conscious presencing and evokes there upon that series new orders of recollection and anticipation, these that become new possible objects of consciousness.
As for intelligence this is simply one kind of rational partitioning and reorganizing mentally of objects of consciousness, of our own contents of perception and thought. We call intelligent whatever rises more in and toward the actual reality in question, namely is able to understand and to adopt new powers and capacities than otherwise were possible. Intelligence and consciousness go hand in hand; they are simply two sides of one coin. Consciousness without intelligence is simply the most basic kind of animal awareness such as perhaps a squirrel embodies in its own self-experience: the squirrel has no language and thus no comprehension of objects as object, minimal or no distinction to extract one precept out of the total field of sensory data, and basically runs on automatic pilot of “instincts” (muscle memory). That kind of consciousness has very little to no intelligence despite that animal instinct can display quite sophisticated behavior (run up a tree, hide an acorn, for example), these behaviors are not examples of intelligence.
Intelligence is understanding, contrary to automatic muscle memory programmed through genetic natural selection. A computer can have plenty of compelx behaviors as well, but it is not intelligent either.
So we might say that consciousness is the awareness or capacity to be present to something (Being, or Dasein; or Being in the world) which at its most logically flattened is simply reactivity, the ability to respond to something; whereas intelligence is what is able to be done in terms of that consciousness, what it can know, understated, overcome, make use of, posit and infer and deduce, build, etc.
Your post seems to be full of incorrect assertions so I am not sure the best place to begin.
There is no degree of seperation between “us” and the object…there is no “us”…we are automatically any object if the object is in our (the) consciousness field. Thus, there is no “ourselves reacting to objects” because our selves are illusory, and do not inherently exist. There is simply a collection of objects bouncing back and forth, anything else is label making and arbitary. Even the defining and seperation objects could be argued as meaning making.
There is no causality, only linked objects. A volcano is linked to the fault line. Often links are close physically but not always, especially in the virtual realms.
A squirrel, can differientate between objects, and has intelligience, if it does not have intelligience it could not differientate between objects. It remembeers that a nut tastes good, and is fundamentally the same type of consciousness as a human eating a salad. A nut is a nut, it doesnt need vocabulary to experience the nut as seperated from that which it is not. A mental retard, or a person on drugs, has less than animal consciousness, but even so, still has the ability to seperate objects, no language ability is needed, because our vision seperates objects inherently, and because we have memories and feelings associated with those images.
IQ is an arbitrary comparison to other people at a given point in time. 200 IQ points today is not the same as 200 IQ points 30 years ago. It’s a moving scale. It’s a measurement of a person’s capacity to solve very specific types of problems. None of those problems are metaphysical in nature. Saying we could be better at understanding consciousness if we had a higher IQ score is like saying we could be better at poetry if we scored better on math tests. The two may have some overlap but it’s not really a good way of gauging aptitude for the other.
Edit: Nevermind about this ^. You seem to have addressed it.
That said, if we were intelligent enough to understand an afterlife assuming there is an afterlife, you could make the argument that we would have solved the riddle of mortality to begin with, which kinda eliminates the need to understand an afterlife. Considering we know plenty of things about keeping people alive and literally 0 things about what makes up an afterlife, where it is, what it is, how it is, literally nothing, we are much more likely to solve mortality before and it is possible we may stop caring about it to the same extent once we do.
I would like to add I think a more usable definition of intelligence and consciousness though.
Intelligence : How much information you can process.
Consciousness: Being able to process the information that you are processing information.
A “soup” is food. You’re definition is vague and not useful.
Also a zombie, birds and I believe everything you listed as not being “intelligent” according to your definition is intelligent, just not as intelligent as humans. But you shouldn’t say that just because a bird may not understand mirrors that they can’t understand food scavenging or solve other problems. This is only important because you are trying to create a dichotomy between intelligence and consciousness using examples of things that have both.
Of course there are separations. That is what it means to speak of objects… this and that. You really ought to think more deeply and sincerely about these things. How do objects come to be? Division of substance. What does this mean? It means all sameness is the product of underlying differentiation’s, difference and its repetition as Deleuze notes; i.e. you can always take any “one substance” and subdivide it into constituent parts, and discover structural relations amongst those parts, relations that EXPLAIN the object in question. This is what intelligence does, in part – it extracts conditions and analyzes in order to re-form in new ways, to understand and make (new) use of. How do you think we got to the moon, or decoded our own genetics? Maybe because “There is no degree of seperation between “us” and the object…there is no “us”…we are automatically any object if the object is in our (the) consciousness field”? Ha. Maybe you think we “are the moon”, and therefore that is how we arrived there? Heh.
And by the way, there is no “the conscious field”, consciousness is as I stated, consciousness OF something. Always. Consciousness is a function of, a product and extensible relation pertaining to said contents of consciousness, of a conscious act – for example, you cannot define or speak in terms of “consciousness as such” because it has no universal properties or being, except as I mentioned previously the fact that 1) to be conscious is to be conscious of something, and 2) that consciousness is a kind of presencing. But you didn’t pick up on that point. I’d suggest some basic phenomenology.
As for “there is no causality, only linked objects”, it is the LINK which is the CAUSATION. Clearly you haven’t thought this one through either. To have a link between two things means exactly that there is causation between them, i.e. influence, effect, encounter. What else could it possible mean? Perhaps you would like to explain to me the ontological structure of a link that has no causation whatsoever? Good luck.
To your last point, squirrels make differentiations based on superficial distinctions of image, shape and color and not based on understanding, intellect or rational abstraction. A squirrel cannot ‘cut out’ a segment of its perceptible field and objectify this AGAINST that background information, all a squirrel is capable of doing is obeying, again by muscle memory or “instinct”, the fact that somewhere in its brain there is a group of neurons that were genetically encoded across millennia of natural selection to fire in the presence of such-and-such a sensate image, for example the shape and coloring of an acorn – when that IMAGE is present to the senses that neuron group fires, triggering a cascade neurological effect that fires up the body to ‘act’, e.g. to seizure the arm muscles in such a way as to cause them to reach out and grab the acorn. There is no intelligence anywhere in that, it is pure reflex.
And obviously that pure reflex isn’t at all what we ought to be talking about when we speak of intelligence. Also quite obviously I never said the human beings were not also subject to this kind of instinctive muscle memory, in addition to being capable of intelligence. But I can see you are unable to draw the distinction between intellect and reflex. Fair enough.
Cant tell if you are serious or sarcastic, but if you are sarcastic i will have to point out that you are wrong. Scientists who plotted the graphs were the graphs they plotted, they were also the moon. There is no seperation between them and the objects…the seperation is between the objects themselves. Objects doing calculations on other objects.
If consciousness is a function of conscious components, then either the conscious components are exactly the same as consciousness, or are different and if they are different they are therefore unconscious. Either way, you might as well not have said it because its irrelevent and doesnt add to the discussion.
Presencing doesnt make logical sense and doesnt add to the discussion, you may think you are smart but you havent fooled me. There is no such thing as time and no such thing as “presensing” in this context, since as soon as you sense something it is automatically conscious, there is nothing ‘pre’ about it.
Consciousness has no universal properties or being? In that case, neither of us should be talking aboutt squirrels, we are both making blind faith assertions about squirrel consciousness. Hell, I can’t even be certain of other peoples consciousness let alone my own.
Lack of clarity on my part. What I meant by that is the “type” of consciousness they have. I am certain my own consciousness exists, if that’s what you’re asking.
