Is consciousness evolved?

[firecracker]

I have several excerpts from "ARE WE ALONE?" by Paul Davies, on which I would like some comments.
(pp 106) "The only type of consciousness we know about so far is embodied consciousness - consciousness in living organisms."
(pp 107)"I believe that consciousness is not as trivial a thing as it appears in the standard biological picture. In fact, it's not a trivial thing at all. It's a fundamental property - a fundamental emergent property - of nature, a natural consequence of the outworkings of the laws of physics. In other words consciousness is something that doesn't depend crucially on some specific little accident somewhere along the evolutionalry way."
IMHO, the entire universe is conscious and the embodyment of consciousness in living beings is for the purpose of the universe being able to experience itself.
Comments please!

[coberst]

Originally Posted by firecracker

I have several excerpts from "ARE WE ALONE?" by Paul Davies, on which I would like some comments.
(pp 106) "The only type of consciousness we know about so far is embodied consciousness - consciousness in living organisms."
(pp 107)"I believe that consciousness is not as trivial a thing as it appears in the standard biological picture. In fact, it's not a trivial thing at all. It's a fundamental property - a fundamental emergent property - of nature, a natural consequence of the outworkings of the laws of physics. In other words consciousness is something that doesn't depend crucially on some specific little accident somewhere along the evolutionalry way."
IMHO, the entire universe is conscious and the embodyment of consciousness in living beings is for the purpose of the universe being able to experience itself.
Comments please!

I pretty well agreed with you until the last paragraph. I do not know how you managed to fit the last paragraph with the first two paragraphs.

We have in our Western philosophy a traditional theory of faculty psychology wherein our reasoning is a faculty completely separate from the body. “Reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement.” It is this capacity of autonomous reason that makes us different in kind from all other animals. I suspect that many fundamental aspects of philosophy and psychology are focused upon declaring, whenever possible, the separateness of our species from all other animals.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy and psychology regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

“These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting [for traditional thinking] in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real.”

All living creatures categorize. All creatures, as a minimum, separate eat from no eat and friend from foe. As neural creatures tadpole and wo/man categorize. There are trillions of synaptic connections taking place in the least sophisticated of creatures and this multiple synapses must be organized in some way to facilitate passage through a small number of interconnections and thus categorization takes place. Great numbers of different synapses take place in an experience and these are subsumed in some fashion to provide the category eat or foe perhaps.

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh”.

[InfiniteNow]

Originally Posted by coberst

I pretty well agreed with you until the last paragraph.

So, basically, you agreed with the quotes of Paul Davies, but disagreed with the comments made by the member posting them, firecracker.

[livingproof]

Originally Posted by firecracker

I have several excerpts from "ARE WE ALONE?" by Paul Davies, on which I would like some comments.
(pp 106) "The only type of consciousness we know about so far is embodied consciousness - consciousness in living organisms."
(pp 107)"I believe that consciousness is not as trivial a thing as it appears in the standard biological picture. In fact, it's not a trivial thing at all. It's a fundamental property - a fundamental emergent property - of nature, a natural consequence of the outworkings of the laws of physics. In other words consciousness is something that doesn't depend crucially on some specific little accident somewhere along the evolutionalry way."
IMHO, the entire universe is conscious and the embodyment of consciousness in living beings is for the purpose of the universe being able to experience itself.
Comments please!

I agree that consciousness is an emergent property as Davies describes it, and subject to the laws of physics. Consciousness develops but has already emerged by the time a baby is born (eat, not eat is well established). Consciousness is a higher function, transformed from lower functions in human cognition, and is not at all inseparable from the organic neural network that supports it without profound trauma to the organism and its potential for life (brain-dead - conscious severed from body; paralyzed - body severed from consciousness; severe mental disorder - both, either). In other words, in a natural and relatively healthy state, a human is a synchronous juxtaposition of material and virtual, and conscious of the condition.

If consciousness was considered for the sake of argument to be a form of energy, and if potential energy can be transformed into kinetic energy and back again, then consciousness is indeed a condition that can be shared theoretically (or hypothetically) among any organism that is capable of containing, generating, manipulating, transferring, and receiving energy, whether or not it is aware of that energy in a "conscious" or intellectual manner. Do inanimate objects possess consciousness? By this definition, yes, but by natural observation, it would be difficult to convince someone intellectually that a car is aware of itself, despite what the Mustang Club members want to believe or what Stephen King immortalized in "Christine". Animistic cultures ascribe consciouness to objects, and linguistically mark them in some cases as animate, rather than inanimate. They perceive consciousness in the objects. If they perceive it, is it really there or just a flawed perception? Impossible to tell.

That the universe is conscious and organisms are conscious so that the universe can experience itself is not so far-fetched. It might be impossible to know whether the universe is exercising its will (a human lower function) or not, but the tremendous and unfathomable distribution of energy and the output required to sustain it through laws of conservation indicate that the nature of energy is to generate and sustain itself indefinitely. It surely appears to have a limitless will to live, with experience being the result of "the outworkings of the laws of physics". Theoretically, I think the last statement is valid and debate-worthy.

[livingproof]

Originally Posted by firecracker

I have several excerpts from "ARE WE ALONE?" by Paul Davies, on which I would like some comments.
(pp 106) "The only type of consciousness we know about so far is embodied consciousness - consciousness in living organisms."
(pp 107)"I believe that consciousness is not as trivial a thing as it appears in the standard biological picture. In fact, it's not a trivial thing at all. It's a fundamental property - a fundamental emergent property - of nature, a natural consequence of the outworkings of the laws of physics. In other words consciousness is something that doesn't depend crucially on some specific little accident somewhere along the evolutionalry way."
IMHO, the entire universe is conscious and the embodyment of consciousness in living beings is for the purpose of the universe being able to experience itself.
Comments please!

I agree that consciousness is an emergent property as Davies describes it, and subject to the laws of physics. Consciousness develops but has already emerged by the time a baby is born (eat, not eat is well established). Consciousness is a higher function, transformed from lower functions in human cognition, and is not at all inseparable from the organic neural network that supports it without profound trauma to the organism and its potential for life (brain-dead - conscious severed from body; paralyzed - body severed from consciousness; severe mental disorder - both, either). In other words, in a natural and relatively healthy state, a human is a synchronous juxtaposition of material and virtual, and conscious of the condition.

If consciousness was considered for the sake of argument to be a form of energy, and if potential energy can be transformed into kinetic energy and back again, then consciousness is indeed a condition that can be shared theoretically (or hypothetically) among any organism that is capable of containing, generating, manipulating, transferring, and receiving energy, whether or not it is aware of that energy in a "conscious" or intellectual manner. Do inanimate objects possess consciousness? By this definition, yes, but by natural observation, it would be difficult to convince someone intellectually that a car is aware of itself, despite what the Mustang Club members want to believe or what Stephen King immortalized in "Christine". Animistic cultures ascribe consciouness to objects, and linguistically mark them in some cases as animate, rather than inanimate. They perceive consciousness in the objects. If they perceive it, is it really there or just a flawed perception? Impossible to tell.

That the universe is conscious and organisms are conscious so that the universe can experience itself is not so far-fetched. It might be impossible to know whether the universe is exercising its will (a human lower function) or not, but the tremendous and unfathomable distribution of energy and the output required to sustain it through laws of conservation indicate that the nature of energy is to generate and sustain itself indefinitely. It surely appears to have a limitless will to live, with experience being the result of "the outworkings of the laws of physics". Theoretically, I think the last statement is valid and debate-worthy.

[Boerseun]

Yes. Consciousness is evolved. Like eyesight, hearing, taste and smell is 'evolved'.

The universe is not conscious. There is no evidence for it. The universe might be argued to be some 'hyperorganism' in the sense that Earth can be described as one big 'superorganism' - but that's semantics, and doesn't imply consciousness.

Actually, I think we make much more of consciousness than what it is. I believe my dog is conscious, he simply lacks the words or the means to express them to show it to me. Obviously, not any form of consciousness that we can understand, seeing as we think in words. But I think a dog also has an 'internal dialogue' which happens to consist of pictures and smells. Consider a dreaming dog, for instance.