Consciousness: Emergent property or A'Priori condition?

Ok, let me touch on a couple replies while I have a minute or two.

First let me clarify what is an emergent property.
An emergent property is an unforeseen and unanticipated feature or property of a system that arises by virtue of the complexity of that system.
The idea is actually a standard in Sci-Fi, think Terminator, the computer network attained to such a degree of complexity that self-awareness and a sense of ego "emerged" thus ending the world and putting a couple hundred million $$$ in Arnie's wallet.

Defining conciousness;
con·scious·ness

/ˈkɒn ʃəs nɪs/ Show Spelled [kon-shuh s-nis]
noun 1. the state of being conscious; awareness of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.

That is the best definition for our purposes here.
It can't be denied that plants and animals lacking a nervous system still fall within that definition.

@meagain & Voyage, I think you guys are equating consciousness with conscious thought.
They are not the same thing. Maybe if we consider consciousness and awareness to be equivalent in this instance, that might help.
Animals posses consciousness/awareness, but do they carry out conscious thought process's or do they just react via a complex system of instinctual and conditioned responses?
I believe that as the complexity of the nervous system increased, the ability to "think" developed, and solely for survival reasons;
consider the past, evaluate the present, and make predictions about the future based on the previous two data sets.

That is "thought" at it's most rudimentary form.
As that ability emerged, it allowed life forms the ability to choose their course of action rather than being solely driven by instinct and conditioned responses.
That is one prime difference in computers and biological life.
Computers, no matter how complex, are still constrained programming and it is that programming that gives any appearance of "thought" to the computational results achieved by present computers.
But, who knows, given the postulates of this thread, there does exist the possibility that computer technology could get advanced to the point that a sense of awareness and self could emerge.
Anything is possible, not everything's probable.

Most animals, even lower life forms such as worms, exhibit the above 3 features of "thought" and if you extrapolate upwards parallel with the evolving complexity of the nervous system, the ability for "thought" becomes more complex with greater memory storage for consideration of past events, more attuned and refined sensory apparatus for ascertaining and evaluating the present and greater computational power for making predictions about the future.

But, consciousness preceded those evolutions in the nervous system.

I also believe that the sense of self and self-awareness emerged due to the increasing complexity of the nervous system, but more later or another thread.

Now some intriguing research into plants does suggest that they do communicate, and do so with purpose and intended targets.
http://www.euromed.org.uk/plant-communication.html
(the tobacco plant one was one of the one I had in mind)

http://www.medicaldaily.com/articles/10247/20120611/plants-communication-survival.htm

(below is the actual paper for the above article)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1360138512000544

Now plants do not possess a nervous system, or at least no "system" that we equate with our nervous system, but from the research above, it appears that some form of awareness it at play and the plants are taking "directed action" in response to the environment.

As Meaty pointed out (great sig pic again, your work?) all our behaviors and actions can also be reduced down to chemical messengers and conditioned biological responses, but that's a whole other thread!

Point being, those mechanical process' are not in themselves consciousness, there is still something "receiving" and "transmitting" them.

@spectraltoast,
you are confusing complexity with complicated.
Consider the information you a viewing at this very moment. It is the result of a very complex pattern of 1's and 0's, binary code.
Binary code is the simplest means of conveying information we have, yet it can be used to produce very, very complex patterns or even mathematically define anything in the observable universe.
But it is still just a pattern of 1's and 0's.

Physics also functions this way, taking the most efficient, simplest path/function.


@Meagain, If you re-read the OP, I did make it clear that I considered ALL energy and matter as the physical universe. Energy and matter ARE the same thing. That is why I explicitly made that fundamental "condition" in the OP, was to specifically negate the concept you have introduced.
Remember, everything we have thus far measured, including humans, falls somewhere along the electromagnetic spectrum, except for gravity.
(WTF is gravity, maybe in another thread )

I am considering consciousness to be another type of "energy" that supersedes and is independent from the universe of energy/matter.
That is what is I meant by an A'Priori condition.

That's all I got time for now, I'll be back later.:mickey:

 

PLEASE, give me a little more credit than that.

 

Ok, so I had to look up A'Priori yesterday to get your OP. I had found it to be "preexisting" or "from the earlier". Which led me down a different path than you're treading.
So if I'm reading you right you are comparing the idea of consciousness being a form of energy that has always existed, "from the earlier" vs something that emerged posteriori.
I shouldn't ramble on with that anymore until you confirm I'm on the same page as you or correct my misunderstanding.

But I'm going to wade back into the quicksand again.

I'm going to agree with you on the definition of think. Also call that process intelligence.

I'm going to say that behavior is not exhibiting thought. Nor is this.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that these are false interpretations of those actions as "intent". Ascribing intent to these so called "directed actions" infers intelligence as you outlined above.
I do not think a sperm swims to an egg because it
1. Has a data set reflecting the past.
2. Evaluates the present. (even the word evaluate infers intelligence)
3. Predicts the future.

And then joins with the egg as a result of that process.

That seems to my way of thinking like saying an apple falls to the ground with intentional action therefore it is conscious. To slide in the idea of gravity.

Easy one even for this rube... gravity is the force caused by mass warping space-time. The warp in space time causes objects to pull together.

So, back to the top of my post where I quoted you... I'm not sure I'm understanding your meaning.

 

I think that membrane constitutes awareness. The wall of a cell represents differentiation. Of course any boundary applies whether it be as the result of chemical bonding or choosing allies, if consciousness is endemic to physical reality.

Plants and animals that lack nervous systems still have circulatory systems and nuclear attachments. Nuclear centers set up orbits around themselves.
A nuclear center would be any kind of agglomeration.

 

Ooooh now... I hit on something with that apple thing. Dig it.

Ok, so, the apple falling to the ground does not display intent. But you could be talking the overall system behind that. An apple tree grows as a result of it's environment, fruits, the fruit matures, falls to the ground, perpetuating the species. That could be called the wisdom of mother earth, or, the universe. Are you thinking in that direction?

Now, stick with me here.

That action of the apple falling to the ground is not consciousness or intent. If I throw a rock at you because you're getting all "new age-y"... that rock is no more conscious or acting with intent than the apple. It is merely a part of the system.

Now, each and every aspect of those systems are subject to the laws of forces. (sorry you brought up gravity yet? ) There is the fact that the very foundation of all existence is based on the relative strengths of the 4 forces. If it was not for the precise balance of those forces existance would not be.
Could there be intent and consiousness behind that amazing balance?

 

Energy and matter are not separate things.

Whether a rock be thrown or not, it's intention remains to be rock, so to speak.

I don't think there are forces in opposition but there is polarity, direction of spin or flow which gives a sense of direction. There are countless vortices of polarity and this is what gives the appearance of individuation and competition. The whole fabric though is in a simultaneous flux.

 

Sorry I haven't kept up.
We own our own small business and have been sponsoring a fund raising holiday event and it has been rather busy.

@Voyage and Meagain;
Yes, for the purpose of this thought puzzle let's just assume that the Big Bang was the beginning of this present universe of space/time/matter(energy) and that the phenomena we know as "consciousness" was either;
A) In existence and present prior to the big bang. Not saying such consciousness initiated the big bang, just that it pre-exists it.
That is the A'Priori state. Anything concerning that pre-Big Bang condition is irrelevant to this discussion as we can never know.

B) The phenomena of consciousness did not exist prior to the big bang and has developed and "emerged" as the universe gained ever increasing complexity.

About thought, I did state that I considered thought to be a function/property of the nervous system, and therefore plants and unicellular animals do not possess the biological hardware to "think" as I presented above.

You are still falling into the trap of equating thought=consciousness.

@Voyage;
The ability to think is a function of a complex nervous system. As the complexity of the nervous system increased, so did the complexity of thinking.

If, as you and Meagain seem to suggest, consciousness is equal to thought, then why the appeal of Transcendental Meditation, or most meditative practices?
the goal of such meditation is to cease the flow of thought to experience plain awareness, pure consciousness.
If consciousness was the product of thought, then meditation would not have the effect desired.

Sperm do possess some degree of consciousness or awareness of their environment and do alter behavior as a result.

If you take a sperm sample and place it in an environment with no ovum present, they will swim randomly around. If you then place a live ovum in the environment, they will begin to alter direction until you will see almost all the sperm oriented towards the ovum and making their way to it.
It does not illustrate "thought" the way that humans consider it, but it does show a clear awareness and acting in response to environmental conditions.
That is all I need to confirm consciousness or awareness for the purpose of this brain game.
Saying that something responds to environmental cues with a directed response and behavior like plants have demonstrated is not remotely the same as saying they acted with "intent".
Something does not have to act with premeditated intent in order to be considered conscious.
Even if such actions/responses are simply moving fluid in their systems or altering growth patterns, it still demonstrates a conscious awareness of the environment and acting in accordance with that awareness.

You guys keep wanting to apply features and reactions that are solely human as an indicator of consciousness.

Gravity.....you misunderstood my point.
Gravity is the one force that does not "fit" into the electro-magnetic spectrum or any of the quantum forces.
So What The Fuck is gravity??? We know what it does, we can measure what it does, we understand it's relationship to a particles mass.
But we still don't know what it is or how/why it does what it does. That is why they are slinging particles around at the speed of light in the big doughnut, trying to find the elusive "Higgs-Boson" particle that the math predicts should be there and theories suggest it is the responsible for gravity. Apparently they have "found it" in July.
Who knows, maybe it's the Higgs field that is responsible for consciousness as well as gravity?
My point being, given our current understanding, WTF is gravity? (but it is not crucial to this discussion and takes it off point)

@thedope;

As often happens, you and I are on the same page, just paraphrasing it differently. :2thumbsup:

Gotta go for now.
Will dig up some for info so it's not just Nox's noxious BS.

One study that really got my brain thinking on this was a many year study that would indicate that consciousness is a field we share and that beyond that seems to also be predictive of future events. Will find link and explain further when I have more time.

Oh, someone mentioned not understanding consciousness as a field that permeates the universe and an individual phenomena. Why the confusion? You are part of/inside/generating magnetic fields right now as you sit at your computer. There are hundreds of magnetic fields around you and passing through you. From the remnants of the magnetic field of the sun to our planets to the field from power lines to the field your monitor is producing to the weak field your body produces.
They are all the same "stuff" yet are unique and individual instances of the "stuff" and are influenced by and influence other fields of the same "stuff".
Think of consciousness in the same manner.
thedope touched on this in one of his posts.

Will be back later

 

This is essentially how I understood your original thought experiment and the two possible answers. No problem following you there. Thoughts below...

This is where I feel that I, and Meagain, are getting bogged down. As previous posts covered, the true nature or even definition of, is still not clear. Not just in this thread, but in the scientific arena as a whole.
My feelings on consciousness run along these lines...

I just have trouble swallowing the idea of true consciousness being as abstract as the behavior of sperm seeking an ovum, or plants turning to the sunlight. It is still in question as to whether organisms as intellegent and dogs and dolphins even have sufficient consciousness to contemplate their own mortality. I'm open to your thoughts on this but as presented, your premise is hard for me to wrap my head around.

Further muddying of this is using consciousness and awareness as synonyms.
I do see those words as very very similar. And again, I can't see sperm cells as "aware". The quality of awareness infers "self-awareness" to my way of thinking. That infers conscious thought. To me anyhow.

I suppose I do. I'm running these ideas through my human perspective, that's my default. I don't feel however that means that I am dismissing plants as not having consciousness just because I'm human.

Maybe slightly off point but not really. I have a different understanding of this all together. The Higgs field is not theorized as responsible for gravity as I understand it. It is thought to be responsible for giving particles mass.
Saying the Higgs boson is responsible for gravity is like saying dirt is responsible for apples. You leave out the apple tree in that process.
Gravity is the effect on objects as a result of mass warping space-time. As I understand it the nature of gravity is pretty well understood from Einsteins work and been observed and proven many times. Additionally, I'm not sure how you mean "quantum forces". Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces. I'm not aware of a distinction between quantum and the traditional forces. Strong and weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational. Those are the 4 forces, on both the quantum and macro scales.

Jumping to the idea that the Higgs field could be responsible for consciousness just seems like an extreme unlikelihood, however much modern science started out that way and who am I to say?

So back on point. As always, interested in any links and theories you have to put forth. I always dig this stuff.

Let me put forth my vague and undeveloped general "sense" of this idea and how it relates to all this peripheral stuff.
Quantum entanglement is a proven fact. It's mechanism is not understood but its fact that particles once entangled exert influence across vast distances. If all that is was born of a single point, a singularity, and if all of existence is made of the same "stuff", that is mass and energy, then it follows that all matter and energy is most likely connected.
I can imagine no other reason for the idea that absolutely everything is connected, than quantum entanglement of all mass and energy emerging from one singularity.
That being said, all mass and energy is arranged in systems, from single bosons and quarks to galaxies. I don't feel that infers consciousness. I feel that reflects a grand design if you will... not proof of a Creator per se, but evidence for a grand Wisdom, a universal constant.
There is the idea that, as I said earlier, nothing would exist if it wasn't for the miracle of the exact proportions of the relative strengths of the 4 fundamental forces. Every single property so far observed and measured in our universe ultimately depends on that magical ratio.

Now then, if you'd like to call that "Thee Consciousness That Permeates All That Is" ... I'll buy that.
And then I'd say the answer to your original thought experiment is, consciousness is not A priori, it emerged immediately after the singularity.

 

Dealing a lot of time in altered states, it seems to me that consciousness came first, and our physical reality is a dream or virtual simulation projected by and through consciousness.

I was watching a seminar on consciousness and they had a neuroscientist that had always believed that consciousness was a byproduct of our body, even though no one in the field had any idea how that would work.

One day this nuero-scientists was diagnosed with some kind of brain malfunction, he was in a coma for 3 weeks and his brain was soaking in puss, and had very little activity. For awhile he said he was conscious of just the muk of his rotting brain. He said he felt like he was in primordial ooze while it was bubbling and burping. Then all of sudden by following some sound, he was transported to different dimension, his consciousness left his body and went into a completely different realm of beautiful heavenly mountains, butterflyies, and then was attracted up to this god presence and was given a divine experience inside the vibrations of the universe.

Basically all his theories were shown to be false, and he realized that consciousness is not an effect of the body, but the essential force of the universe. Everything is consciousness.


In the book My Big Toe, this phenomena it is explained very scientifically. He said in the beginning there was AUO or Absolute Unbounded Oneness. This is what Ive experienced in my trips as the state before states, the awareness without thoughts, that state before states. Just what is left when everything else ceases to be.

Anyway this Absolute Oneness is consciousness, just pure consciousness without any objectivity. One day this consciousness realizes it can split itself into individual components and rearrange itself to form different patterns. Then it starts to oscillate itself to create time.

So time starts and this primordial consciousness evolves into more and more and more complex forms. After awhile it realizes if I split myself into two, I can retain some of these profitable patterns while still making new ones. AUM came into existence, or Absolute Unbounded Manifold. Once it learned how to retain patterns, it eventually evolved to create a mind. He calls it The Big Computer, it is the same thing as the Divine Mind, or the mind of God, it is the memory and functioning center of consciousness.

So after trillions of years, and an evolution to a bigger computer, somewhere in this mess sentient beings were developed to go and explore these realms of consciousness that have been arranged by itself.

So the consciousness creates and experience apparatus in order to experience itself in the full and be able to feel and love and touch and see and dance through its creations.

Now the secret is this is has been going on for eternity, so we've played the whole entire creation game a few times. The first place like Earth was probably a very shitty place, everything was probably unrestricted, there might have been bugs that ate your eyes out everyday or something. Now if you notice Earth is really structured, everything works, you can get things like terminal illnesses but usually there is way we can still live with them as long we keep ourselves going. Everything can be used for something, nothing is disregarded. Everything was planned, the grains were first put here so years later people could get drunk on them, everything has been planned.

So for people that explored the other side, yes there is still consciousness. It is the primary function, the body comes after.

 

Interesting thread, but your postulates are flawed.

First postulate: the universe is "somewhat malleable". Indeed. Matter equates to energy, matter is energy in a different form. Indeed. And?

Second postulate: consciousness is not limited to nervous systems. I see no evidence for this. Even entities that are not "alive" (such as viruses) receive inputs from their environment and react to them. Sea sponges do not have any neurons but act in a co-ordinated manner. Plants and single celled organisms move and can react to their environment, they may even communicate in complex ways, as the articles you posted suggest. None of this is evidence of consciousness. As Meagain has hinted, to define simple (or even complex) reaction to environment as consciousness is to stretch that word beyond its definition.

Your conclusion is that consciousness is not a property of nervous systems but a property of the universe. This does not follow from your postulates. Postulate 1 is true but of limited relevance to the issue of consciousness; postulate 2 is false (or at least so lacking in evidence that we have no reason to accept the idea).

All the evidence suggests that consciousness arises as a property of advanced central nervous systems. The suggestion that the universe itself is conscious absent the mechanism of the advanced CNS is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, which you have not brought. Why would you think this?

 

Insights derived from periods when you have made yourself temporarily retarded by taking psychotropic drugs are not the most reliable findings.

 

When we look at matter, what we are really seeing is how energy appears through the prism of spacetime. It's still just raw energy. But strangely, we have arrived in this place where we can witness spacetime warping around energy, making it appear as matter.

If there is such a mathematical intricacy inherent in spacetime, then the ways in which it seems to warp around energy in all forms, including ourselves, should already make sense in some way. We make sense, I think, but I'm not sure exactly what that means. Still, I couldn't give the credit to the body as much as the greater environment for the existence of consciousness.

 

Premier quantum physicist Amit Goswami points out that if diffuse consciousness is the ground of the universe it solves several measurement paradoxes in quantum theory.

Everyone in this thread should take the time to watch "The Quantum Activist," it is very interesting.

My personal belief is that consciousness is not a property of nervous systems. For one thing, the subjective experience of being conscious bears no resemblance in either nature or behavior to the physical constituents from which it is supposedly made. Although it is obvious that many mental phenomena are correlated with changes in neurochemistry and neurophysiology, it is not at all clear that the phenomenon of consciousness itself is a RESULT of physical phenomena (although we are preceding on that non-evidentiary assumption in most fields of research). Brains are the only systems with sufficient complexity to allow consciousness, which is a property of the Universe, to find expression that is physically observable.

The reality of occurences in the field of mind, the nature of such occurrences to the experiencer, and the pervading awareness which takes in both mental and external phenomena have not, and I believe will not, be explained as purely physical phenomena. The consciousness phenomena and the neurophysical occurrences are no doubt related, and probably causality flows both ways sometimes.

 

This is true of many things. For instance, wetness bears no relation to the consitutuent properties of water. Smelliness bears no relation to the constituent properties of odours. Ergo, wetness and smelliness are fundamental properties of the universe that just happen to be channelled through stagnant water, no?

These are experiential terms. We experience consciousness as an emergent property of something else. That's the definition of an emergent property.

For a "premier" quantum physicist, Amit Goswami doesn't seem to have much out there other than self promotion and pseudo-scientific spiritual nonsense. He was in What the Bleep do We Know and The Secret, which, I'm sorry, instantly puts him into my "disregard, quackery" file.

 

I can't fathom statements like these.

 

I did misspell "constituent".

More seriously, is hydrogen wet? Is oxygen wet? Is a water molecule wet? Are two water molecules wet? Wetness is an emergent property of many water molecules, which is not a property of any of its components.

 

It wasn't the typo, we all do those.

Of course there's a difference between hydrogen and H2O. It's just not clear where you're going with that.
I would say wetness is a resultant property of water but, whatev. I guess I'm just not seeing how this bares any insight on the topic. It's cool.

This is a pretty prejudiced put down and doesn't add much to the convo either.

 

Defining an "emergent property", which is pivotal to what the thread is about, and in direct answer to Raga_Mala. You can call it a resultant property if you like. Thanks for the input.

It was a bit of a put down, but it does have quite a lot of bearing on the thread, and is true. People who think they're having deep insights when high? Seriously? Laughable. Try being stone cold sober and speaking to people who are having these deep experiences, then you'll understand something about the relationship of suppressed CNS activity and the capacity for thought... The entire basis of the thread seems to be an example of rationalising just such a pseudo-spiritual insight, though as I suggested at the outset, it is an interesting (if misguided) question and was framed in interesting language.