Is Conciousness only available in Three-Dimensions?

[Sven Tingblad]

Hello everyone, I'm new here. I think I have a defintion of consciousness, but first here's a disclaimer: my only experience with theoretical physics has been from a few books and the internet; so I only have a basic understanding of string theory and physics in general. That said, I think consciousness is the ability to have a concept of a concept, in which you can theoretically keep having concepts of the previous concepts infinitely. For instance, my antivirus program has an extremely basic concept of a computer virus. By that, I mean that it can recognize a virus. But if it could backtrack and recognize that it can recognize a virus, then I think it has achieved consciousness. It could then maybe recognize that it can recognize a virus, ad infinitum. Animals probably are consciousness; they certainly have concepts of gestures and smells, and they probably have sufficiently advanced areas of the brain such as sound reconition to actively think about the meaning, or concept, of a sound. So a consequence of this would be that senses and reactions are not prerequisites for consciousness; the only parts that must exist are ever-increasing levels of concepts. Well, that's just my wacky idea, so feel free to support or discourage it. All feedback is welcome. Thanks.

 

[selfAdjoint]

I think they idea you are expressing here is recursion. Look it up and tell me if you agree.

Chomsky has recently suggested that recursion, all by itself, makes the difference between a species having language capability and not. That would mesh nicely with your definition.

 

[Sven Tingblad]

I found an article on recursion at I found an article on recursion at http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Recursion. I don't pretend to understand the half of it; but I think that's what I'm talking about.

However, I disagree with his statement that animals don't have recursion. Humans have or have the potential to have unlimited recursion, by which I mean they can be recursive about anything. They can have a concept of a concept of everything, e.g., language itself, consciousness, and sights. Animals probably have much more limited recursion; they cannot have a recursive understanding of just anything. However, they probably have a recursive understanding of a few things. For instance, whenever I stand near the cabinet with the dog treats and make eye contact with my dog, she will usually look back at my eyes. If I make eye contact long enough, she will think that I'm going to give her a bone and she will run to me, jump up and down, and wag her tail. She will even look from me to the cabinet and back to me. I think this is far too complicated to be done without recursion, or active thought that if she does a specific action then I will give her a treat. The recursive part comes in when she might think about what action to do. When she wants me to rub her stomach, she'll sit in front of me, raise one of her front paws, put it back down (probably because it's uncomfortable for her), and repeat. Maybe she's just trying to get my attention; maybe she thinks that she is imitating a belly rub and expects me to recognize this gesture and respond. If any of you have a dog, or any pet for that matter, you know the weird things they do that convince you your pet's either psychic or extremely intelligent.

 

[selfAdjoint]

I think the kind of animal thinking you describe doesn't really need recursion. It could just be implemented by a lookup table; there are few enough separate stimuli and responses that that would be feasible (for evolution, of course, heh heh).

We do a certain amount of that too. Apparently we really do have a "grandma cell" which fires if we are looking at her face or a picture of it. Given circa 10^5 acquaintances for even a glad-handing politician (or a classical Chinese scholar's inventory of characters) you could get to such a cell with say 17 yes-no questions, easily implemented in a neural network.

But recursion is a different beast. Recursion is generality, new concepts for old, instantiating the dots in 1,2,3,...

 

[Blossom Morphine]

Fascinating to think about, isn't it? I can only guess at your question. But here's another question I thought of while I was pondering your own: Can the thought process affect the dimensions around us? One could say that our thoughts affect everything around us: the surrounding environment such as forests, cities, and everyday object like combs and even people, in that we think about them and when we act upon those thoughts, we affect them, and thus thought inderectly affected them. We thought about flying and soon our thought led to the creation of a flying machine and soon affected the skies. We thought about warmth even in winter and thoughts evetually led to a fuel source, and soon to fire, and soon to heaters. We longed for ways to stop illnesses and thought soon led to medicines. If thought can affect even our own environment and biology, although inderectly, can it also affect those dimensions if we were ever to fins a way to get there? Would our thoughts find a way to affect that dimesnion directly since it would be a higher dimension?

And relation to your question, perhaps thought must be strong enough to keep the conciousness, and the mind that creates that thought must be exposed long enought to the idea of that dimension to keep the consciousness. It reminds me of a story of a frong who lived in a dark, damp well all it life and had no concept of an outer world. One day, by accident, it hopped out of its well and saw the world around it: trees, lakes, grass, and being it never knew existed such a deer and cats. In that moment, in an attempt to process it all, it's mind simply exploded. It could not handl the info.

Perhaps if a person could shape their conciousnes in such a way so as to bring that dimension in terms the person could understand, then conciousness could be kept. What does anyone else think?

 

[sol2]

Platos Cave

Some might find Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy quite interesting?

If we had understood the euclidean world, and this is all we knew, how much more, have we been enlightened when it has come to the dynamical nature of GR and the recognition of the curvature?

A whole new set of thinking arises from hyperdimensional recognitions and here dimension would have to encompasss the new carrier (the graviton ) as significant, in the continuing discription of what dimension might mean.

Because we look to the developing artistic renditions of thoughtful artist in regard to dienson it has become quite fashionable to see(image?) the furthest reaches on this topic. How do they get there without Gauss?

In the famous simile of the cave Plato compares men to prisoners in a cave who are bound and can look in only one direction. They have a fire behind them and see on a wall the shadows of themselves and of objects behind them. Since they see nothing but the shadows, they regard those shadows as real and are not aware of the objects. Finally one of the prisoners escapes and comes from the cave into the light of the sun. For the first time he sees real things and realizes that he had been deceived hitherto by the shadows. For the first time he knows the truth and thinks only with sorrow of his long life in the darkness. The real philosopher is the prisoner who has escaped from the cave into the light of truth, he is the one who possesses real knowledge. This immediate connection with truth or, we may in the Christian sense say, with God is the new reality that has begun to become stronger than the reality of the world as perceived by our senses. The immediate connection with God happens within the human soul, not in the world, and this was the problem that occupied human thought more than anything else in the two thousand years following Plato. In this period the eyes of the philosophers were directed toward the human soul and its relation to God, to the problems of ethics, and to the interpretation of the revelation but not to the outer world. It was only in the time of the Italian Renaissance that again a gradual change of the human mind could be seen, which resulted finally in a revival of the interest in nature.

The Allegory of the Cave

And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/platoscave.html

http://www.vrc.iastate.edu/magritte.gif
Betrayal of Images" by Rene Magritte. 1929 painting on which is written "This is not a Pipe"

The light behind, in the analogy of Plato's cave, sets up the thinking in how issues from the source[the fire]( and here it might be referred to the fifth dimension)shines in its radiation. How is form realized?

http://wc0.worldcrossing.com/WebX?14@246.WPi7cqXekXB.9@.1dde8852/10

This perspective on the allegory of the cave, to dimension, seemed relevant to me.

 

[Pet Zepi]

No and, in fact, to limit one's Self to only three dimensions could, more or less, be counted as, merely, another form of one-dimensional thinking.

Every thought is geometric. Begins at point A. (But atomic structure is spherical, yes? Hypothetically speaking?)

The key to time is clocking...and the networks that arise, as a result.
Pick your own point A...and, then, agree with another...on a point of lesser or greater value. A point...of entry, so to speak.

(This is where Freemasonry and Sympathetic Magic come into play.)

Physics is not my bag. I'm merely an artist.

;)