Questions about consciousness

Ryan_m_b

As far as I am aware NREM sleep is unconscious. When you are under anesthesia you are unconscious.

Put it this way, whenever you are not thinking you are unconscious

candydude357

But doesn't sleepwalking and other reactions occur in nREM?
EDIT: and non-lucid dreams

Ryan_m_b

Yes in the slow wave period of NREM however the sleepwalker is not in a full state of consciousness

candydude357

Does that mean COMPLETE lack of consciousness or "partial" consciousness?

Ryan_m_b

Enough to mean you have no recollection, don't perform entirely rational acts and have a limited capability to respond to the environment

Pythagorean

The argument is that you don't know, not that I know. It's a subtle difference, but with something like subjective experience, It's an important one.

I still havent heard any mechanism for consciousness, so it's not really me who has the onus. I'm not claiming plants are conscious. I'm claiming it's not even a scientific question.

Though at any time, any of you are welcome to show me formally how matter can be conscious in the first place and simply prove me wrong.

Maybe I just missed that breakthrough.

Ryan_m_b

We don't require an understanding on the mechanism of consciousness to characterize and recognize it anymore than we need to understand the mechanisms of digestion to recognize what it is, what it isn't and what is required or not. Psychology and cognitive neuroscience are devoted to studying aspects of consciousness, are you going to say their efforts are unscientific because they do not understand the mechanism?

DaveC426913

Perhaps I misunderstood. Or perhaps you were actually being sarcastic/facetious.

In your earlier post, you seemed to be arguing that plants might have a form of subjective experience, since they evolved along similar lines as higher life forms. I just don't follow that logic.

Pythagorean

I'm trying to point out the difference between functional and phbomological.

All we have a grasp of in science (and this is the bio forum, not the philo forum) is functionality.

Sure, we play sound with consciousness in cognitive sciences, but that's more stamp collecting than mechanistic models.

The few successful models that can be argued from neuroscience (ie say selfridges pandemonium model) DON'T point to a correlated master controller as Ryan implied, they point to neural competition.

The point is not to bring plants up to "our level" but to bring us down to the level of, if all you could do was measure your physical states, you wouldn't guess humans are conscious besides for the very bias fact that you're conscious.

Pythagorean

Ryan, no. At one of my jobs, I characterize and classify infrasonic acoustic signals. It stamp collecting, it will be useful someday. But to claim I know the mechanism for how this signals arose without any ground truth would not pass peer reviews. I don't know the mechanism of te signals I study.

I can go now and make my own signals and correlate them, but there's mad degeneracy in the system.

Same is true with neuroscience (see Eve Marder)

Pythagorean

Sorry for crappy iPhone typos.

DaveC426913

Thought you were having a seizure...

Or proving a point about the deleterious effect of infra sound on neural processes...

Ryan_m_b

Regardless of what you may have to do to pass peer-review you recognize that you don't have to understand the mechanism to characterize it.

We can define what we mean by consciousness and examine if things match this definition. We can say that consciousness includes memory, imagination, planing, decision making etc and examine to see what allows these (we know it's the brain) and what possesses these attributes.

DaveC426913

To play Devil's Advocate:

I think the point is that all of the above is self-fulfilling: we see that because it is what we expect to see where we look for it.

Is imagination required for there to be consciousness? If we come across an entity that doesn't have one or more of those things, does that mean it is not conscious?

Ryan_m_b

Not necessarily, I see your point and I agree but we do have these phenomenon. We define them under a banner (consciousness) and then look to see if anything else has it. Whilst there may be different types of consciousness it is highly unlikely that plants have any kind of consciousness.

Pythagorean

Under this banner, humans that were conscious and suffering were assumed to be comatose.

Or did you have something mor sophisticated than the medical definition?

All I'm demonstrating is my lack of faith that you actually have the grasp of consciousness that you claim to.

DaveC426913

Agreed. As with rocks and atoms, so it is with plants. Not only do we not see signs of consciousness, we are at a loss to even posit a plausible mechanism by which they might.

The onus lies on others to put it forth. Till then, Occam says case closed.