garthoverman

"Straight out of Berkley" LOL!! You nailed it!

A definition of consciousness has been attempted countless times, yet I don't know if one can actually sqeeze a complete definiton into the limitations of human language.

Consciousness is being. An equation might help visualize better: consciousness = being. It is the fundamental nature of consciousness to express itself. In our physcial realm of frequencies, consciousness makes a temporal 'stamp' upon the space-time continuum by coalescing energy into form and outwardly displaying its expression thusly. Physcial qualities are those characteristic of matter, and non-physical qualities are subjective to the perceiver.

Does that help at all? What do you find so disconcerting about self-aware car keys?

Yours,

Garth

Kent Stevens

This sounds like just another example of word abuse from Pantheism. Consciousness is a vague notion and is easily open to misinterpretation, but I think the following definition is more faithful to the common usage of the word.

consciousness = self-awareness

Animals in general would have self-awareness and machines may be capable of this property. But it is radical to redefine consciousness to say that everything has this property.

According, to the first definition car keys would have consciousness. Plants and bacteria would have this property. The Sun and the Earth would have consciousness. The Universe as a whole would have consciouness.

The best practice is to say what you mean. If you mean being, you should use this term instead of consciousness. If you mean universe, you should use this term instead of the word god.

garthoverman

Really? Go figure....

To be is to be conscious is to be self-aware. I think your equation complements mine nicely. The self-aware implication was lacking before.

Ahh... were the English language so simple. I say what I mean, it is you that does not get my meaning.

Yours,

Garth

Jayhawker Soule

No ...
You are, indeed, master of what you write here. In like manner, the audience is the judge of what you've communicated. At issue is whether you've communicated anything beyond superfluous word play.

garthoverman

Yes, that is the issue. The difficulty I face is my own limitations with communications. I use the words I think are the most appropriate as I understand them. Yet I'm discovering that my understanding of certain terminology does not exactly match that of the rest of the posters.

Basically, one might call it 'superfluous word play,' the other might find deeper meaning. The answer lies within the beholder. Your interpretations are colored by your own experience with the concepts and connotations associated with the words I select, which in turn distorts my original intent.

Yours,

Garth

Jayhawker Soule

The intent is not to distort your words.

What variation(s) in human experience would render the "concepts and connotations" of self-aware car keys sensible?

Jobar

"I think; therefore, I am."
I think = I am
Consciousness = being.

If Garth is just engaging in meaningless word play, looks to me like he's in good company.

When we say that energy is equivalent to matter, is this meaningless? Yet look at the practical applications of that bit of word play.

In our day-to-day lives, we can easily treat matter and energy as separate. Likewise, we need not expect any conscious behaviour from our car keys. It's only when we examine our concepts minutely that the equivalences become perceivable.

Does anyone care to claim that they are unconscious? No? I rather thought not.

Is our consciousness something different from our physical being? Since we are many of us aware of the many studies of the connection between mind and brain, I expect that the answer to this is no, also.

So, isn't it obvious that consciousness is inextricably linked with the matter/energy of our physical brains? With our being?

The problem here, I think, is that our languages simply cannot describe the ultimate nature of reality. Even our most precise mathematical physics runs in to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. I see our present difficulty with definitions as an exact philosophical parallel with quantum uncertainty- when we approach ultimate *concepts* our terms become blurry, impossible to pin down.

RD, your questions about the usefulness of pantheism may have an answer here. Pantheism helps us to learn what we can, and cannot say. And this lets us understand the limits of our own, human, consciousness.

"The word which can be spoken is not the ultimate Word." We cannot define reality with ultimate, infinite precision- as our definitions become more precise, we can relate them to the universe less; as we learn the position of a particle more precisely, the less we can say how it is moving.

[ September 16, 2002: Message edited by: Jobar ]</p>

Jayhawker Soule

Descarte's method of 'hyperbolic doubt' might also have been phrased: "I doubt, therefore I dismiss." I really can't see the guy chatting about self-aware car keys.

Therefore { being = consciousness } ? NO! 'I am therefore I think' is neither the philosophy of Descarte nor the logic of physics.

[ September 17, 2002: Message edited by: ReasonableDoubt ]</p>

Keith Russell

Greetings:

Descartes existed, whether he was able to think, or not.

But, sans an ability to think, he could not know/be aware of of his own existence.

Cogito ergo sum is a way to verify (know, be certain of) of one's own existence.

Keith.

Marz Blak

I agree with this point of view.

The problem I have with pantheism as an ontological approach is largely the same that I have with various theistic approaches: in speculating about things outside of our scope of observation, or generalizing from our scope to *well outside of it,* it is unfalsifiable. There is no way to know if one is right or wrong, is on the right track or totally off-the-mark.

Pantheism does have certain logical advantages over systems which posit the existence of a personal god, and I think that is a big part of its appeal to many. But I think the innate human need to understand, the innate human discomfort with the truth of the matter, which is that we don't know anything significant about the nature and origin of existence, and probably never will, is the driving force behind all ontological thought.

To me, metaphysics in all of its stripes is interesting, in the same way some types of good science fiction are interesting. That is to say, it is essentially by its very nature speculative; and while speculating about things we do not have (or, maybe, cannot gain) evidence for might be intellectually interesting or diverting, I personally don't think there is much more to be gained from such activity.

Metaphysics has been derided by many as a sort of mental masturbation, and I think that this view, while perhaps overstated, does contain a grain of truth. Which is not to say I find anything particularly wrong with masturbation, so long as one doesn't allow one's fantasies to intrude into reality.

In an earlier online incarnation, I used to use this as my tag-line: "There are no answers, only questions." I no longer use it, but it is still the one foundational axiom of all I believe to be true.

[ September 18, 2002: Message edited by: Marz Blak ]</p>