Is my spinal cord conscious?

[MiM]

I have very little qualms about swatting a bee (except that they are generally useful insects, so I try not to), even less a fly or a mosquito. I have absolutely no idea about how they experience pain, or if they do experience it at all. But for chimps and cats and dogs, I think we have good reasons to anthropomorphise. It can actually go the other way too. I remember, my sister about 20 years ago, then a veterinarian who studied psychology. She claimed that cats and dogs have no consciousness, or that we at least have no real reasons to believe they have. I am especially happy about the work of Frans DeWaal, where he has taken humans down from the piedestal, and shown how close the behaviour of our fellow mammals really is to our own.

We are in for some very interesting debates about what consciousness really is when we start making robots that behave like they had it

[Hermit]

I mean the phenomenology. The feeling of self.

[pErvinalia]

Yeah, the really interesting thing will be if we create an intelligent robot that we somehow conclude has inadvertently (or not, perhaps) gained consciousness, but still not know how consciousness works. So we might end up creating a conscious entity by basically simulating a human brain in a machine/computer, but like with a human brain still have no idea how consciousness emerges out of it.

It reminds me of a cool thought-experiment, from some researcher in the field, called The Chinese Nation. Basically, if we gave everyone in a china a walky-talky and then had each person simulate being a neuron, and then do exactly what a bunch of real neurons do in a human brain while some conscious behaviour is occurring; would consciousness emerge from it? If you are a pure functionalist (like I pretty much am, I think), then you have to accept that consciousness would emerge out of that grand-scale experiment. The real freaking thing is trying to get your head around what exactly it means for the whole nation of China to be "conscious". It's a bloody mind blowing field, is consciousness.

[pErvinalia]

I mean the phenomenology. The feeling of self.

What does that mean? Do you not know what subjective phenomenology means?

[MiM]

BTW, I don't necessarily think consciousness is a on/off thing. I think there are many levels at which something can be self-conscious. Actually you only have to get thoroughly drunk to experience a lesser degree of consciousness. Thought this way, there is no well defined point at which consciousness emerges, it's a sliding scale.

[Hermit]

I mean the phenomenology. The feeling of self.

What does that mean? Do you not know what subjective phenomenology means?

I read some Husserl in the past. This lead me to add phenomenology to metaphysics, positivism, psychoanalysis, libertarianism, the dictatorship of the proletariat et al in the metaphorical landfill site. It would be nice if you expanded on what you are driving at, but suspect this won't happen.

[pErvinalia]

Try asking questions instead of isolated emoticons.

If you know what mental phenomena are, then I'm not sure what you don't understand. What do you think feeling and reflecting on pain is? That's a mental phenomenon. The hard problem of consciousness is working out how physical brain states lead to mental phenomena (and vice versa, I presume). When someone dies and you feel "sad". What do you think that is? We all have these mental feelings. If you accept that they happen, then there needs to be a physical explanation of them. THAT's the hard problem of consciousness.

[pErvinalia]

BTW, I don't necessarily think consciousness is a on/off thing. I think there are many levels at which something can be self-conscious. Actually you only have to get thoroughly drunk to experience a lesser degree of consciousness. Thought this way, there is no well defined point at which consciousness emerges, it's a sliding scale.

Just thinking about this, I'm not sure that being drunk is a good analogy. We are most certainly still conscious when we are drinking, it's just that we forget it afterwards. Essentially we are physiologically impaired. And I'd imagine the point of going unconscious after having a huge amount of grog probably isn't all that different from going unconscious when we fall asleep.

[Jason]

Still conscious, but to a lesser degree. Less self-conscious, decision making impaired, etc..

Speaking of, did anybody define what being conscious is? Apparently it's different from sentience. Are dogs conscious and sentient? What about their anuses? Anii?

What's the plural of anus anyway?

[pErvinalia]

Yeah, the definition of "consciousness" is problematic. But in a sense, its still as mysterious if we declare it as "awareness" vs the more problematic "subjective qualia". How is being aware of your surroundings in some higher animal way different from a tapeworm being aware of its surroundings? How is it different when we jump phyla? Are fungi and plants "aware" of their surroundings? So how do you define "aware". If it means forming mental maps of your surrounding, then hows that different from forming "qualia"? Both require the creation of the "mental" from the physical.