How Do Various States and Forms of Consciousness Differ?

[Ryan_m_b]

I would take that as a non-reply. I specifically pointed out where a definition of consciousness failed (the medical one). I have a right to be skeptical that you (anyone) really even know what it means to be conscious to be able to judge other species in the first place. Being conscious isn't enough. In the words of Dennett, Everybody thinks they're an expert on consciousness because they're conscious. But they really have no scientific leg to stand on, only a philosophical and anecdotal one.



this is why I used the words "subjective experience" rather than consciousness. We have a bunch of philosophical and emotional baggage attached to the word consciousness.

I still have no clue whether other life forms have subjective experience; I don't even know how it arises in humans. I think the onus is on either side to prove invertebrates do or don't have subjective experience. Until then, it's philosophy.

By the way, since you're confident, where do you draw the line? Do lower mammals have subjective experience? What about insects, fish, worms? Obviously you wouldn't think single-celled organisms have any kind of experience if you don't think plants do. So where do you draw the line?

Can we now start talking about mechanisms for consciousness rather than vaguely restating our positions?

You previously said something to the effect of "plants are just a bunch of chemical interactions". So what you're saying is that humans have a soul that sets them apart or something? I don't get it. Maybe you started using the word "consciousness" to mean "soul" and still haven't realized it? Prove to me that you're more than chemical/physical interactions.

I'm sorry but you are completely constructing a straw man argument here. In no way did I suggest that humans needed a soul, however the emergent property of the human central nervous system creates consciousness. As far as we are aware consciousness is the only way one can experience anything (any unconscious event is marked by a lack of experience). In no way am I claiming to have absolute answers on what consciousness is but I would limit "subjective experience" to the domain of organisms with a central nervous system because as I have said, this is the only thing we know of that can create consciousness via emergence.

There's no need to get so aggressive, honestly

 

[Pythagorean]

There's no need to be so passive and avoid the argument either, as long as your going to post.

But I will work towards being perceived as assertive.

So what do you consider "central". Would you consider C Elegans as conscious?

 

[Pythagorean]

I mean, you realize "central" is an arbitrary line we draw right? Are half-central nervous systems half conscious, or does one integrating neuron make a difference like a binary operator: 1 or 0, conscious or not?

 

[DaveC426913]

Yeah, I thought we were, at least for the sake of this argument, in agreement that no nervous system = no consciousness and no subjective experience. While we may have a very broad grey line between conscious and not, we can agree on an area of not.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

There's no need to be so passive and avoid the argument either, as long as your going to post.

But I will work towards being perceived as assertive.

So what do you consider "central". Would you consider C Elegans as conscious?

I'm not being passive or avoiding the argument but I find it highly off putting when, on a forum meant to be for constructive discussion, people start throwing up straw mans and putting words in my mouth. You really seemed keen there to suggest that I was trying to bring religion into a discussion when it is only your misinterpretation (or if you didn't understand what I meant you could have asked) and eagerness to battle down such a notion.

You're also really labouring this idea that I should be able to define everything about consciousness and if I can't then what I am saying is wrong. I don't know if C. elegans has a consciousness, it isn't a well defined topic. However it is defined enough that we can conclude that plants do not possesses a consciousness. If something shows signs of introspection, learning, decision making etc it is reasonable to say it is conscious. If you can't find those things in an object I would argue it is safe to say that it isn't conscious. But this isn't an issue I've studied intensely but I don't think that there is any evidence that plants experience or have consciousness.

Are you interested in helping the conversation progress? Perhaps you could propose your own uses of the word "consciousness".

Lastly, by this point I feel that the OPs question has been thoroughly answered.

EDIT: again cross-posted but I agree with Dave, there are many grey areas but we can point to situations where there is no evidence of consciousness

 

[apeiron]

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.

You said that sensing is not an activity that requires consciousness. So what about memory? Computers are said to have memories for instance. Ants and spiders would have memories of some degree.

And the same with decision making...perhaps even planning...

You see how poorly a "collection of essential functions" approach actually characterises consciousness. You end up saying, well our kind of memory or sensing or thinking or feeling or planning or deciding or perceiving is the conscious kind. Theirs is not.

You are just dressing up what is indeed pretty obvious - that plants, rocks and computers are not going to posess anything much like even a minor degree of subjective awareness - with some technically-competent sounding terms.

To get anywhere, you have to instead focus on some core definitional action that is then properly generalisable.

And you mentioned it with predictive modelling (which is also why imagination is one of the hardest faculties to credit to the non-conscious).

So a subjective state is what it is like to have an anticipation about the world. To be forward modelling events. On that basis you can say plants are simply reacting (so just sensing) and are not imagining anything ahead of time. On the other hand, a computer or neural network built so that it can really operate on an anticipatory basis would seem to be conscious in some meaningful sense.

 

[apeiron]

I would limit "subjective experience" to the domain of organisms with a central nervous system because as I have said, this is the only thing we know of that can create consciousness via emergence.

This is then the other way of hand-waving away the crucial issue. The cogsci approach says lump together a bunch of faculties. The "complexity" theorist says take enough of something and then something else pops out as a global property of an entirely different kind.

So that is why a theory of consciousness should look like the identification of a single core generalisable process.

 

[Pythagorean]

Perhaps you could propose your own uses of the word "consciousness".

as I said "subjective experience"

that's it.

all the other philosophical and emotional baggage can go out the window. We can define detection, memory, and learning in a mechanical way that any set of materials is capable of if arranged correctly.

Once you're start talking about "free will" or a "soul" or a special, separate "you", your are avoiding a mechanistic, physical description. Our measurable behavior is a complex electrochemical interaction based on a stimulus, just like a plants. Molecular networks in primitive life forms can display associative learning and decision-making, too:

https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3226519&postcount=15

Again, though, you have to separate this from subjective experience. That's why I prefer to drop the word consciousness; because everyone has emotional and philosophical baggage associated to it that they never can lay on the table.

When it comes to subjective experience, we have no clue how it arises. It's all the other things that you associate with consciousness (memory, learning) that, mechanistically, can equally describe a computer or another life form. You just call your memory/learning consciousness because you can ascertain that your subjective experience is attached to it.

I'm not being passive or avoiding the argument but I find it highly off putting when, on a forum meant to be for constructive discussion, people start throwing up straw mans and putting words in my mouth. You really seemed keen there to suggest that I was trying to bring religion into a discussion when it is only your misinterpretation (or if you didn't understand what I meant you could have asked) and eagerness to battle down such a notion.

I never brought up religion. To me, you implied a nonphysical agent must be at work in humans when you said "just chemicals" for plants. Nonphysical explanations of consciousness are not religious, they are dualist. But all I accused you of was an implication, which is a process that involves my judgment, so it's not a "strawman" argument. In fact, it's an opportunity for you to clarify things. Are you operating as a physicalist or a dualist or using another basis of assumptions? I'm a physicalist. This tells you the assumptions I work from (physicalism).

I suspect you're a physicalist too, since you keep saying emergence. I am actually quite familiar with the kinds of papers that come out of Physics Review E and AIP: Chaos. What you should quickly learn if you want to publish in such a journals is that "oh it emerges" is not enough. Emergence is an arbitrary and degenerate. We have next to nothing int he way of general rules of emergence. It's a fascinating, nascent discipline. It's the frontier, in my eyes (speaking of the "nonlinear sciences", see AIP: Chaos's "about us" page:)

http://chaos.aip.org/about/about_the_journal[/URL]

it is very much in an exploratory phase.

So if you want this conversation to be constructive, then ditch this attitude:

[QUOTE]You're also really labouring this idea that I should be able to define everything about consciousness and if I can't then what I am saying is wrong.[/QUOTE]

You're exaggerating, of course. It only takes one fundamental test. Not "everything about consciousness". We know plenty "about" consciousness. But that's a very ambiguous, general statement.

Apeiron shaped the request better than I did:

[QUOTE=apeiron]To get anywhere, you have to instead focus on some core definitional action that is then properly generalisable.[/QUOTE]

This is the kind of answer I'm looking for. I don't think "predictive modeling" would satisfy you though, since most lifeforms can be viewed as predictive modelers going on the only measure you can make: behavior (p. 6, paragraph 2 of the plant apices paper I posted earlier).

All's I'm saying is it sounds like you have information that I don't that allows you to confidently make judgments that I cannot.

It's the fundamental question "how can matter have subjective experience?"

Saying it emerges doesn't answer the question, it creates thousands more questions (see Eve Marder's paper: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v14/n2/full/nn.2735.html" for an example of biological degeneracy, though I can point out many more in proteomic models as well)

Yes, it emerges, I agree, but that's already the approach I take to the question. What's next? How does it emerge, what is the underlying informational structure of a system that is conscious vs. one that is not. For me, it starts with understanding information flow and structure in physiological neural networks. And the more I learn and work my thesis (of the same study) the more I recognize how important the chemical signaling networks in the human body are to the function of the brain and global regulation (based on transcription factors, which are based back on the stimulus) the more I question the simplicity of the question.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

Nope I don't have any more information than you, I also don't have a definitive list of things that I would define as consciousness. I don't have a thorough explanation for how consciousness emerges. I do have an understanding that unconsciousness leads to a lack of subjective experience (at least one that is retained), from that I would conclude that a plant does not experience because it seems to display all faculties of something that is unconscious (or as I said earlier, if it has a form of consciousness it's so radically different the qualia of it wouldn't map) therefore probably doesn't experience.

Consciousness, experience and emergence are all fascinating and incredibly complex fields however I feel that the OPs question was answered to the level of detail required.

 

[Darken-Sol]

where does awareness fit in? if it does. i don't have to be experiencing any thing to be self aware. also how can you define consciousness without being able to rely on subjective data? for all i know i could be the only person who is conscious. i'd have to take your word for it if you told me you were too. my buddy posed the question "how the hell would you know if we see the same colors?" i wouldnt. everything red to me, could be blue to him. as long as we agree certain things are the same color as other things we agree, green is green. but there is no proof either of us see each others green.

 

[candydude357]

Question: does dreamless sleep even exist?
Because I looked up stages of sleep and it says even the deepest stage of sleep has dreams, as well as sleepwalking and night terrors. So are there always dreams?
Or at least conscious thought very closely resembling dreams (w/o visualization perhaps)

 

[candydude357]

bumpforreplies

 

[DaveC426913]

Provide a reference. I understood that deep stages of sleep are dreamless.

 

[candydude357]

http://psychology.about.com/od/statesofconsciousness/a/SleepStages.htm

 

[apeiron]

Provide a reference. I understood that deep stages of sleep are dreamless.

http://dreamscience.ca/en/documents..._BBS_23_851-866_1040-1057_c-rem_and_reply.pdf

Studies have shown there is mentation or drifting, ruminative, thinking going on probably the whole time given that even those awoken in stage 4 report something. As I mentioned in an earlier post...

 

[DaveC426913]

Question: does dreamless sleep even exist?
Because I looked up stages of sleep and it says even the deepest stage of sleep has dreams,

http://psychology.about.com/od/statesofconsciousness/a/SleepStages.htm

I didn't read where it said that. I read that dreamnig occurred in stage 5, but there are quite a few other stages in which it does not mention dreams at all.

 

[candydude357]

Sorry, wrong link.
I did read it somewhere else tho.
Also are we sure that those experiences actually occurred at stage 4 and not on some other stage?

 

[candydude357]

Sorry for doing this, but bump.

 

[DaveC426913]

I don't understand what more you want to know.

Are you doubting what you are reading? How can we know? What are you reading?

 

[candydude357]

Can someone summarize that pdf?

 

[Evo]

This thread is going nowhere. Candydude, I suggest that you learn how to google.