On 29 May 2013, at 08:33, meekerdb wrote:
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.
The point is more that it is > 0, 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).
That is about consciousness' content. Not on being or not conscious.
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.
Most plausibly. But this again is about the content, and the character
of consciousness, not the existence or not on some consciousness.
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.
Sure. Bats have plausibly some richer qualia associated to sound than
humans. But what we discuss is that consciousness is either present or
not. Then it can take many different shapes, and even intensity, up to
the altered state of consciousness. Cotard syndrom is also
interesting. People having it believe that they are dead, and some
argue that they are not conscious, but in fact what happen is that
they lack the ability to put any meaning on their consciousness. It
shows that consciousness seems independent of the ability to interpret
the consciousness content. Many pathological states of consciousness
exist, but none makes me feel like if consciousness was not something
(rich and variated) or nothing. You refer to the content of
consciousness, not consciousness itself.
Bruno
Brent
--
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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
