Consciousness

Oh really? Interesting choice; most other teenagers I meet want to try every type of psychedelic out there and just get fucked up like crazy. At least you have the courage to restrain yourself from that by personal choice.

But psychedelics ARE pretty amazing; don't you have at least one desire to try them every once in a while?

 

Interesting, Emanresu. Thanks for the response!

PML - of my friends, I'm the most fucked up of us all. Yes, I do have the desire, but I'm also sensible enough to realise that going it alone isn't the best of ideas and none of my friends would stick by me because they disapprove of drug use. I'm sure I'll try them someday, but right now, I'm just enjoying the natural highs life brings me.

 

You should read the Bhagavad Gita. Very enlightening.

 

I am fairly certain that humans will eventually create conscious machines. But since we do not know what is necessary for consciousness I wonder if maybe some of our gadgets are already conscious.

The possibilities and implications are scary. Perhaps we will create conscious machines long before we create machines that have a way to let us know that they are conscious, and that could potentially be awful.

If my computer is already conscious then I hope it is happy, I would hate to think I've been tormenting a conscious being by making it run video games for me and such.

 

You can't tie together imaginary divisions

 

I think it has to be admitted that it's essentially a mystery. I don't think words can actually define consciousness.

I mean, it has to be a mystery, 'cause you'd be using consciousness as your tool to figure out what it is, and you have no way of objectively saying it's accurate. It really isn't a moot point; it's actually just the TRUTH!

I don't know if we can create conscious machines. I don't think you can just give a machine such a depth of thought that it just becomes conscious. I think you're conscious first and then contemplative. I think whatever you did to make a machine conscious would have to be ethereal...like, maybe if you loved it enough it would become an entity. lol

 

Some things are more conscious than other.

 

I see no reason why we could not make conscious machines. We are conscious machines. A woman's womb constructs a biological machine from raw materials and at some point it becomes conscious.

I don't believe in souls or disembodied minds so to me the fact that a womb can construct a conscious being implies that it is at least theoretically possible to do so in a lab. Consciousness arises from arrangements of matter.

 

Any systematic arrangement implies consciousness, but consciousness is a series of one to one relationships which accounts for the appearance of "incremental" consciousness.

 

Ugggh..... back to the varying degrees of consciousness again.....

I don't really care to have an in depth debate about this but I just wanted to note that when I read that first paragraph it didn't sit well with me. Something about saying we are machines just like Made me deduce the human condition/experience to this cold, umsympathetic, static being in my mind'. I view us more as extensions of the plant world constantly growing, changing, taking what it needs, but also giving back. I think we are much more dependent and interconnected with nature and the cosmos than machines.

 

Yet the functioning of the cosmos is mechanical in nature.

 

It's funny how some people are disturbed by the idea of being a machine and some aren't. It's never really bothered me.

 

In my opinion:

(1) consciousness is awareness--a product of sensciene and cognition. Until that happens, a being is not really conscious. To have those properties and be aware is to have a soul. That's why I believe life begins with the development of conscience, not conception.

(2) we don't know what else has consciousness, but my guess is that other animals have it: chimps and other primates, other mammals like dogs and cats, probably rodents, whales and dolphins. There seems to be something going on inside all of those heads. Possibly others. Then there's proto-consciousness, which is not full awareness but the stuff that becomes awareness. Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead believed all matter had it.

(3) I don't think consciousness and emotions are the same. Emotions can be unconscious or sub-conscious, if psychoanalysis is still valid. Nor do I think consciousness and thought are the same. Thought is the ability to put things together, and that can be done unconsciously. Consciousness depends on sense perceptors, but sencience is only one ingredient of consciousness, the other being cognition.

(4) Language sharpens thought, but consciousness can exist without language.

(5) I don't believe consciousness lives on after death, because it depends on brain activity.

(6) When we are asleep and not dreaming, or have passed out, we are unconscious, by definition.

 

Hallucinations presuppose consciousness. That is to say that only things that are conscious can have hallucinations.

 

Halitosis presupposes bad breath.

 

It is so hard to summarize thousands of years of thought into a few answers. If you are that interested in consciousness I highly recommend you read, "The analysis of mind" by Bertrand Russell. This, for me personally, is a definitive source for the analysis of consciousness and I have yet to find better essays than Russell's on the subject. I'd go as far as to call it the bible of consciousness. The book immediately opens the subject wide up and his thoroughness is admirable. I'd also reccommend anything by Nietzsche on the subject. He was one of the greatest minds of all time and was incredibly misunderstood. At any rate enjoy your journey and never stop questioning everything.

Here's a link to "The analysis of mind." You can read it for free and print it off if you like.

http://russell.thefreelibrary.com/The-Analysis-of-Mind

 

As is any given organic brain and the systems of a body.

 

Yet the conceptual nature is wholly spontaneous.