/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9504116
OP here. I actually think it's plausible that things which aren't traditionally considered "conscious" do have some consciousness, but it is so minuscule as to be approximately zero for all practical purposes. For example, a thermostat might be "conscious" but only in a very minimal sense. A modern supercomputer would plausibly be "more conscious" but, again, only minimally so. Basically something along the lines of Integrated Information Theory in one of its various forms.

Yes, self-awareness is the intellectual ability to be aware of your own existence or even reflect upon it. Consciousness is a fundamental property of "having an experience". You can have either without the other.

For anyone genuinely interested in the fundamental mechanics of consciousness (and holding the assumptions that consciousness exists and may be explained), I recommend checking out work by Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi. Koch takes a more neurobiological approach, while Tononi attempts to define consciousness more mathematically. If you are interested in the neurobiological approach, I can really recommend looking into experiments on blindsight and visual cortex TMS - there is definitely a lot to be explored and understood at frontiers.