Consciousness

Last updated 2004-06-28 by Roedy Green ©2003-2004 Canadian Mind Products.
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Purpose

Definition

You could function perfectly well, doing all the thinking, choosing and reacting you do now, on automatic without consciousness and no one else could tell.

Consciousness is not your ability to reason or your common sense. It is much more than just the ability to react to your environment. It is your ability to appreciate your environment, to care what happens.

If you are conscious, there is somebody home, truly feeling, experiencing, worrying, not just going through the motions.

Another sort of definition: consciousness is an apprehension of the whole that emerges when a threshold of electro-chemical activity is reached.

How Can You Tell If a Fellow Human is Conscious?

You presume, not that unreasonably, that fellow humans are also conscious when they are awake or dreaming.

But you don't really know that much about their internal experience. For example, colour blind people experience red and green as very similar. Yet to your eyes, they likely appear very different. Some people could even experience green subjectively as red, and red as green. They would be totally unaware of the switch. You could be one of them. There is no way anyone could tell. They would label all red and green objects correctly, just feel them differently inside. They might even experience the rainbow in some way that is unlike any internal colour experience you have, e.g. synthesesia.

It is obvious we experience colours differently, at least to some degree, or everyone would like the same colours. The way we experience a colour is partly as an emotion, partly as associations, partly as memories. Imagine a new colour unlike any you have ever seen before. Perhaps that is how others experience red.

Because there is so little genetic information in your DNA, there is no way the details of all the interconnections in the brain could be genetically determined. This leaves things open for much more variety than we might first expect to find.

We know that brain waves quiet down when you become unconscious, but as far as I know, no one has done experiments to correlate brain wave activity with subjective consciousness intensity. If there were, you might be able to compare two people and say person A is currently more conscious than person B.

Other Types Of Consciousness

We discover sages who seem more awake than usual. They tell us their internal experience is infinitely richer and more intense than ordinary waking consciousness.

Most people have at least a few experiences of cosmic consciousness in their lives.

How Can You Tell If an Animal is Conscious?

1. Some children were told that insects, fish or frogs feel no pain.
2. Some children were told that insects, fish or frogs feel pain, but it is ok to torture them because they are not conscious. They just look like they are feeling pain. They are really just little machines going through the motions simulating pain.
3. Some children were told than most creatures that appear to be feeling pain truly are feeling pain, however, these creatures are unimportant compared with humans, so it does not matter.
4. Some children were told than all creatures that appear to be feeling pain truly are feeling pain, thus it is wrong to needlessly torment them.

We share a part of our brain (the brainstem) with the reptiles and fish. It handles basic survival such as breathing and movement.

We share a part of our brain (the hypocampus) with the other mammals from mice to whales. It handles emotions.

We share a part of our brain (the neocortex) with dolphins, whales and elephants. It handles logic and reasoning.

We assume that consciousness and some part of the brain are intimately linked, though in other times in history people associated the seat of their being with the heart or the liver.

We don't know much about how consciousness and the various parts of the brain are linked. We do know that people can lose large chunks of their brains and still function normally, apparently conscious.

Some people, usually Christian, argue that only man is intelligent and only man is conscious. Therefore only man matters. Though other creatures may look like they are struggling and feeling, they are just going through the motions. They point to man's large brain as proof. The only catch is that the brains of dolphins, elephants and whales, are considerably larger than human brains. Further, there is evidence these creatures too are intelligent, perhaps in some ways more intelligent that humans. So if large brains are an indicator of consciousness, it seems to me then surely dolphins, elephants and whales are also likely conscious.

Genetically humans are 98.6% identical with mountain gorillas. What is so different about us that would explain how the gorillas would not be conscious and we are? Were our ancestors the Cro Magnon and Neaderthals conscious? When did this consciousness thing that makes us so all fired important kick in during evolution?

You are also conscious when you dream. We know for example that dogs dream. Those that believe dogs are not conscious tell us that dogs just pretend to dream, just go through the motions, they don't actually experience anything internally. Why postulate such elaborate pretense without any evidence for it?

Man has a sense of humour. Perhaps that is the key indicator of consciousness. So do elephants and dolphins.

Man is compassionate. Perhaps that is the key indicator of consciousness. Both dolphins and elephants care for the sick. Elephants adopt orphans.

The most obvious sign of human consciousness is awareness of the environment and reacting to it. By that criteria every living thing is likely conscious. You can even see microscopic animals probing their environments and reacting to what they find.

Economic Decisions

For example, in 1800 people argued that it was ok to mistreat slaves and horses because they had no eternal souls. This was their way of talking about consciousness. The soul (consciousness) was something that inhabited a body and survived after death. Once it became economically feasible to give up slavery and work horses, we decided that mistreatment was wrong.

Similarly, today people argue it is ok to torture chickens in the production of eggs, by wiring their feet to the bottoms of their cages to stop them from moving around and wasting calories, and making it possible to pack many chickens into a small space. They argue that is ok to scald chickens to death. Anyone who has suffered even a small scald wound knows how painful they are. They tell us when chickens squawk, it does not matter. The pain is just simulated. There is really nothing home in the chicken.

My view is that we don't know for sure one way or the other, so we should err on the side of humane treatment. I eat only free range eggs. To me, if a chicken squawks in pain, I'd think, that unless I have extremely strong proof otherwise, I should presume I am truly hurting it.

From my personal experience, chickens are not that bright, but they are protective of their young and show worry, pride, contentment and terror with different clucking sounds.

I would hope anyone contemplating torturing me because they doubted my consciousness would give me the same benefit of the doubt I give to chickens.

Computer Consciousness

When computers start doing most of the things that humans can do, the question will come up, are they conscious? Like Data and the Doctor on Star Trek, they may claim to be conscious, but how could we tell?

We may decide to treat them as conscious, on the pragmatic grounds that they have the power give us trouble if we "hurt" them or refuse them the rights of conscious beings.

To some people, the notion of computers being conscious is just as ludicrous as the notion that life could be created in the testtube was a decade ago. After all, life was something mystical requiring divine intervention. It turned out life was much more mundane than we thought. It may turn out that consciousness is no big deal either.

Vanity

Christians love to quote Genesis 1:26: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

They mistakenly think it gives them to rights to destroy the planet and to enslave every other species. I look forward to the day when we have proof that consciousness is much more common than most imagine and man will feel mightily ashamed for all the past suffering he has brought on other species.

Consciousness After Death

• Out of body experiences. In these, it appears you can leave your body and wander around the world in three dimensions. However, your body is not dead.
• Near death experiences. Oddly the fanciful things that happen nearly alway are in perfect sync with the subject's religious beliefs. Again these are not after-death experiences, just near-death experiences. However, it depends on just how you define death. Some of these may be considered after-death experiences.
• Evidence for reincarnation. Some people seem to have an uncanny knowledge about some dead stranger's life. They may be picking up this information from living relatives, perhaps in some extrasensory way.
• Most of the world's religions promise their followers after death punishments and rewards in return for how faithfully they followed the rules of the religion. If you ask a believer how he knows this, he points to some holy book which is considered by definition true.
• Ghosts. Nearly everyone has a personal ghost story. If even one such story is true, there must be such a thing as a ghost. A ghost is not necessarily the consciousness of a dead person. It may be something conjured up by the viewer, or by the environment the dead person lived in.

Research

Buddha

Life is instantaneous and living is dying. Just as the chariot-wheel in rolling rolls only at one point on the tire, and in resting rests at once point, in the same way the life a living being lasts for only the period of one thought. As soon as that thought has ceased the being is said to have ceased.

Paradoxical though it may seem: There is a path to walk on, these is walking being done, but there is no traveler. There are deeds being done, but there is no doer. Ther is a blowing of the air, but there is no wind that does the blowing. The thought of self is an error and all existences are as hollow as the plantain tree and as empty as twirling water bubbles.

Therefore there is no self, there is no transmigration of a self; but there are deeds and the continued effect of deeds.

From his point of view, consciousness keeps spontaneously arising in thought quanta, but there is no permanent experiencer.

Learning More

	Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence
	0-674-57616-0
	Hans P. Moravec
This book tackles the fundamental problem of identity in a quite accessible way. Am I my body, my pattern, my process, my consciousness? He points out the the coming merger of man and machine will crack our age old notions of life and death.

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