Consciousness, A Discussion

jeh h'sh dzj wenoo
.
.

Human is honored among the animals for skill with language .

 

Possibly the same way that the light in a room goes away when you press the "off" switch.

 

It depends on the animal. Mirror recognition tests of self-recognition indicate that chimps, orangutans, orcas, elephants, and magpies are self-conscious in that sense, while other animals and human babies aren't. Of course, as you say, there are good reasons to suspect that our pets and babies have consciousness and are not just automatons. Self-awareness seems to be a function of intelligence, which accompanies brain development.

As for consciousness during dreamless sleep, the only consciousness I experience during sleep is dreaming, which is usually pretty vivid. The rest is entirely inferential. I've read the research that the dreams and REM sleep are only a fraction of the total sleep experience, so I conclude that the rest is a blank--i.e., no awareness, i.e., no consciousness.

 

Consciousness never disappears. It only seems to. It would require time in order for consciousness to disappear, but time is entirely dependent upon consciousness. The analogy I would make is a book with another book in the middle. The first book seems to stop halfway through, when in fact it never stops, and the second book begins. The first book can't be said to have ended for a period of time, however. It just carries on in a different place, and if you know the page number, no time has to elapse between where the first book seems to end and begin.

The only place time exists is within consciousness. When you lose consciousness, time for you literally stops. It isn't continuing, even though other people who are still conscious will have a perception of passing time. Time doesn't stop or carry on when you are unconscious, because there is no time for it to stop or continue. Your time simply carries on whenever you are conscious. There is no interim where time continues to exist when you lose consciousness. For others it will seem to continue, and they will measure the space between loss of consciousness and regaining of consciousness as a certain amount of time elapsing, but this is literally only an illusion for you.

 

I think this confuses the objective with the subjective. If we define consciousness as phenomenal awareness or sentience, as we've been doing, then it does in fact "disappear" whenever we cease to be aware or sentient. The capacity for it remains, and we regain it when we wake up. Of course, people are free to make up their private definitions, but that makes a good discussion impossible. I think time continues whether we're conscious or not. We may no be aware that we slept through the football game, but after we wake up and turn on the TV, we discover that it really happened.

 

We don't "cease" to be aware, though. Cessation requires time, which doesn't exist in the absence of consciousness. When you seemingly fall "unconscious" all that exists as far as you are concerned is random fluxuations of the cosmos. They are in no order whatsoever and are thus timeless. When consciousness is "regained" the random fluxuations collapse again and time resumes. In the interim is just a great big question mark. That's my opinion, anyway. For me this resolves the issue of consciousness seeming to start and stop, for the only time time exists for the individual is when the individual is conscious. Consciousness is really just a steady flow, and the idea that it ever stops is just an illusion.

You may find that a really good conversation on consciousness is impossible, if you define a really good conversation as one that actually defines consciousness. There's no way to define it that will be as adequate as the experience of it itself. We all already know all there is to know about consciousness, and the rest of this is just desperation and boredom in the form of conversation.

 

I'll keep that one in my back pocket the next time I oversleep and late for work or a date.

 

ha ha

 

Time is more a product of imagination than consciousness. You can be conscious of your memory of the past and imagine the future and the difference between the two is time, but if you're only conscious of what's happening then there is just a flow.

 

You have to be conscious to imagine anything.

 

I guess a better way to put it is you can be conscious without a sense of time.

 

I doubt you can be conscious without being somehow cognizant of a chronological order of events, or at least have whatever awareness you possess determined by a chronological order of events.

 

It's just being fully conscious of what's happening. There's no sense of time when the mind stops producing thought.

 

This post is very backwards and confusing about time. Time never disappears, only consciousness and it's PERCEPTION of time disappear. I don't know if PERCEPTION of time is your only definition of time or what, but time is a lot more than just your perception of it. Consciousness can be completely shut down, gone, "disappeared", not experiencing any time that is going by. You can be put down for a two hour surgery and come to afterwards and only think 10 or 15 minutes have passed. Your consciousness was out, turned the hell off, for the most part of that real time. The 10-15 minutes were the grey areas where your consciousness was fading out and back in. I have experienced this myself, the waking up from surgery and disbelief in how late it is. It wasn't an illusion, my mind literally lost the conscious observation of 105 minutes of that day because it was turned off. Dream sleep is is a different type of consciousness and a different perception of time. A dream that is only 6 minutes long in actual real time could be perceived as being a hour long inside the dreaming consciousnesses.

 

May the sub'concious be respected as an aspect of concious ?

 

To relaxx: You can't observe time. Time is just the measurement between two different moments, but the past and future don't actually exist so neither does time. Light is the only constant and at the speed of light time doesn't exist.

 

We don't move at the speed of light though, you have pretty much negated our whole existence here. I don't think we would ever age if what you were saying was reality, although maybe I am misunderstanding you.

 

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. I think one still experiences time when they're not thinking. I think animals experience time. It's not like when we stop thinking we suddenly go all Slaughterhouse 5 and bounce from one time to another. The order of time still exists and still effects us, except when we're not conscious.

I never said that time disappears. It would take time for time to disappear, so it can't rightly go away. Consciousness creates the order of time, however. Without consciousness there is just complete randomness and disorder. Consciousness never disappears either. You're confusing two different worlds.

I think you're not understanding what I'm saying. I'm saying time is completely relative to the observer. One time span can flow in one direction and another in another. Just because two hours can seem to pass for someone else doesn't mean that any time has actually elapsed for you (when you're unconscious.)

Your mind actually lost no time at all. When you were sleeping, as far as "you" (your consciousness) was concerned, the universe was in complete and total disarray, having no order and thus no time.

Yes, time is completely relative to the observer. Probably why a dream that only seems to last six minutes to the outside world but seems an hour to you is because your consciousness is making some semblance of order in the cosmos, but not the complete order that it has when you are waking.

Physics says otherwise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrqmMoI0wks

 

What utter nonsense. Relativity also tells us that space-time warp depending on the density of energy and gravity contained in any particular section of space-time. There is no such thing as a "straight line" through the universe or straight line diagonally through space time. That video is just clueless misinformation.

 

Well I didn't watch the video. I assumed it would have useful information. But the fact remains that physics tells us that the past, present, and future coexist simultaneously.

Sorry about the video I'll be more careful in the future. I don't really feel like watching it, but I also get the feeling that you could just be nitpicking too.