crocodile deathroll

I too disagree that our ability to distinguish between this and that as a prerequisite for consciousness, because our ability for this is a bottom up process. If a little toddler was to see a nice tasty piece of fish lying on top of garbage pale lid it would be just as tempting to him as it would be if it was on a nice clean dinner plate.

I am more of the view that the emergence of consciousness is the product of a phase transition when the universe achieves a critical level of complexity.

Ierrellus

croc,
I went to the site you mentioned in your post and found it fascinating. It will take me a bit of time to comprehend what is being said there. I put it on "favorites" so I could go back and read at leisure.

Tell me more of your personal beliefs on consciousness after death. Is this a form of reincarnation? For myself, I prefer oblivion of consciousness after death. It beats the heaven and hell scenarios.

When I mentioned the distinction between this and that as a prerequisite for consciousness, I was jumping far ahead from an evolutionary perspective of organisms that are supposedly not conscious to those that supposedly are.

If an organism, say an amoeba, is to survive, it must have an internal mechanism that tells it what is outside its body that is useful or harmful. In more complex organisms there is a time delay in which the neocortex provides the conscious consideration of possibilities of action. This is a fine tuning of the organism's need to "know" what lies beyond its skin.

A human toddler is handicapped in that its brain does most of its development after the infant is born. It must be taught how to use its time delay between urge and action. A horse in born able to walk; and to crave mother's milk rather than loco weed.

Sensory data is one prerequisite for consciousness. If you are unconscious, you are not aware of your sensory input. So excreationist's distinction between unaware and aware informational processing systems is quite valid as a beginning constituent of human consciousness.

Ierrellus
PAX

[ August 22, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]</p>

Ierrellus

Mr. Sammi,

Your knowledge, my friend, is diminished by your irritability. Chaos theory--if true, negativity could engender viruses.

Ierrellus
PAX

Ierrellus

snatchbalance,

Yes, a limited definition of consciousness is possible. It would rely on information gleaned from philosophies of consciousness, AI, neuroscience and coginitive evolution. What upsets me in the postings on several threads is that posters will argue with theists that evolution is a more informative model for explaining reality in flux, but will balk at concepts of cognitive evolution declaring that this approach has no defineable stages of progression!

If evolution is true at all, it gives a model of change as natural selectivity of adaptational (to environments) competence. Cognitive evolution fits this model as well as does any other survival technique. Piaget's stages of cognitive development in children, although often conclusionally flawed, is a really good approach to cognitive evolution in general. It may even have exonerated the dirty word "recapitulation" as
a model, not necessarily of physical evolutionary replay, but as mental evolution matching physical changes.

More anon,

Ierrellus
PAX

[ August 23, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]</p>

crocodile deathroll

I feel before you should consider the nature of consciousness after death you should consider the nature of consciousness before birth. Although the nature of consciousness after death is a subject of intense debate the nature of it after death has gone on virtually ignored. I believe the nature of consciousness after death is identical to the nature of consciousness before birth, and once your are dead there is no possibility of discerning one from the other.
Since our brains a composed of the same physical material on a sub-atomic level, then a Gestalt Switch to another brain's world-line is highly likely scenario. Therefore this form of reincarnation is not beyond the realms of possibility.
With horse it is just top-down non linear processes and is very rigid and inflexible and genetically blue printed . We have the advantage of much better bottom-up linear processing
This bottom up processing like that of human toddlers is what gives us sense of unique sense of self, like we have the option of not only being able to walk with our legs, but also perform complex dance routines.
There is a rather amusing little test. If you were to show a little toddler (Jane) under 3 yr old a chocolate box and ask her "what do you think is in the box? and she says "chocolates". But then you tell here "no its not, its pencils". So you open the box and show her it is pencils. Then you tell Jane "your friend Joey is coming into the room, what to you think he will say is in the box?", Jane replies "he will say pencils too", because she is yet to think of herself as a separate person thinking independent of Joey. I think at about three years of age is when our bottom-up processes really takes off.
And at the very early stages of here conscious development she may well of been right, because the morphology of the fetal brain was governed by a top down processes of human genetic information.
Then more we fine tune the bottom up processes like knowing the direction to though a ball to a target the more we feel our unique sense of self.

Ierrellus

croc,

I really appreciated your post. It is not contradictory to any of the evolutionary patterns of change that I believe occurred. As far as Gestalt theory goes, I have read some material, but am still not too knowledgeable of what I have read. I will give the ideas more consideration.

The idea I got about other animals being more fortunate than human animals came from my American Native friends who stll envy an animal's immediate response to any environmental situation; and that they seem to survive better than we can.

When I play my guitar before toddlers, they dance! You are so right on the advantages humans have from a long, social indoctrination. The gorillas would probably not dance. Aside: Nietzche's Zarathustra says. " I will not trust a god who is not able to dance."

Ierrellus
PAX

Ierrellus

Realizing that I could be accused of teleological suppositions, as if purpose is not legal tender in evolutionary studies, I will present my findings.

First Stage of Cognitive Evolution:

Unicellular level. Prokaryotic cells become eukaryotic. Advantage. Protection of organism's DNA blueprint by encapsulation. Protection includes shield or barrier against random, environmental chemical reactions. The shield becomes sensitized to what lies beyond it. Primary senses, then, are located in the shield (skin) of the organism. Sensitivity to light, touch, sound, pheronomes are chemical detectors in the skin. Quantum physics is retained in these
chemical activities. It may be possible to reduce this biological transition to wave functions; however, the beginning of living organisms as separate entities in the physical field is the encapsulation of DNA.

Ierrellus
PAX

crocodile deathroll

I think consciousness has not much to gain from a survival perspective in Prokaryotic cells or even sponges and sea jellies as it would have for us. Consciousness may be no more useful for a sponge than insect wings. In fact it may well be a very serious hindrance. Even most of our bodily functions are unconscious chemical reactions like digestion. Consciousness, although it would be very useful for life forms in order to give them some survival advantage over an automaton, they first the means to react to those threats with the sensory input of the threat so they can physically react to it. Otherwise it would just get in the way, like insect wings on a sponge. So I do not think consciousness could exist merely for consciousness's sake

croc

Ierrellus

croc,

I thoroughly agree with you about consciousness.
It would be quite useless for a prokaryote or for many other organisms. I had thought skin sensitivity was a good place to start in showing how senses developed. Carl Woese seems to have shocked the cellular evolutionists with his notion of three types of unicellular creatures that, swimming in a pool of DNA, probably exchanged genetic material horizontally. Archaea, bacteria and eucaryotes. He believes his theory will cause researchers and theorists to have to look beyond Dawin's Descent of Man.

Can Woese topple Darwin? All in good fun. I'm just along for the ride.

Ierrellus
PAX