On 20 August 2014 04:16, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > > If your altered state of consciousness has no self-awareness, is it still > "consciousness"? And there's self-consciousness, i.e. being aware you are > thinking. So it's not 'fading' qualia, it different categories of > consciousness. I'd say my dog has self-awareness, e.g. he knows his name. > But I'm not so sure he is self-conscious. The koi in my pond are aware, but > I doubt they are self-aware. >
So this is all that Brent means by degrees of consciousness, after all the waving it in everyone's faces as though it had huge explanatory power, it's now been reduced to whether or not an organism knows certain things about itself. This looks to me like a lot of backpedalling on what started out as a rather grandiose concept, but which has now ended up as something fairly trivial. So koi carp don't have a concept of self (who would have thought it? What fools you've been in the all-or-nothing camp not to realise that!) But it now appears that Brent just stepped out of the "consciousness continuum" camp (from thermostats, according to Dan Dennet, to us) and into the "either-conscious-or-not" camp. Is someone going to welcome him? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
