On 5/28/2013 11:13 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 28 May 2013, at 19:23, meekerdb wrote:
On 5/28/2013 9:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 28 May 2013, at 01:53, meekerdb wrote:
On 5/27/2013 2:18 PM, John Mikes wrote:
Bruno:
do you indeed exclude the "other" animals from being selfconcious? or - having a
logic on their own level? Or any other trait we assign (identify?) for humans - in
our terms?
A question about plants (rather: about being conscious):
you may feel free to define 'being conscious' in human terms, or mammal (etc.)
terms, but the "response" plants exude to information (circumstances, impact. etc.)
shows reactivity we may appropriate to us humans.
So do not deny consciousness from fellow DNA-bearing plants.
How about the DNA-not-bearing other creatures? (crystals, stones, water, impact you
may call energy, - whatever?)
Anthropocentric? zoocentric? phitocentric? what-CENTRIC?
I don't think consciousness is an all-or-nothing property. You have to ask
"Consciousness of what?" There's consciousness of surroundings: sound, photons,
temperature, chemical concentrations.... There's consciousness of internal states.
Consciousness of sex. Consciousness of one's location. Consciousness of one's
status in a tribe. I think human-like consciousness requires language of some kind.
Hmm... I would have agreed some years ago. I would have even say that consciousness
always involve consciousness of time. But I am no more sure on this. Some altered
conscious state seems to be like being conscious of literally only one thing; being
conscious, and nothing else, but such state are quasi not memorizable, and might quite
exotic. Sometimes there is consciousness of something, but which is not related to
anything temporal or spatial. My be in math some feeling like that can occur, when
understanding a proof, for example.
Many aspect of human consciousness requires languages, but humans have still a big
part of the animal consciousness. You don't need language to feel the hotness of a fire.
Then you are agreeing now. If you agree that consciousness can have different aspects
and some aspects may be lacking in some species, then consciousness is not all-or-nothing.
Why?
Consciousness can take many shapes.
I would say it is "all-or-nothing", like a continuous function is either non-negative or
negative, even if it can be close to zero.
I don't see the analogy. I don't think consciousness can be negative, or even that it can
be measured by one dimension. "All-or-nothing" would be a function that is either 1 or 0.
If you can be conscious of red and green, then I'd say you are more conscious than someone
who is red/green colorblind (albeit by a tiny amount). In order to have beliefs about
arithmetic requires that you be conscious of numbers and have a language in which to
express axioms and propositions. I doubt that simpler animals have this and so have
different consciousness than humans. I don't venture to say less consciousness because I
think of it as multi-dimensional and an animal may have some other aspect of consciousness
that we lack.
Brent
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