/sci/ - Science & Math

loads & loads of overkill, consciousness begins at levels a lot simpler than is generally thought

>>10816363
>why do microanimals and insects with only the most primitive nervous systems appear to have intelligence

Consciousness a fundamental property of matter. Viruses to thermostats have consciousness.

>if X needs nerves why do animals with nerves have X?

>>10816363
Define consciousness

>>10816380
So you agree that tardigrades and ants have consciousness? That's a pretty big claim.

>>10816378
How would you explain the fading qualia thought experiment or that matter in the brain is regularly replaced?

>>10816387
The ship of Theseus still exists in the realm of matter. Its rearrangement does not change the fundamental property of universe. The property of all matter being conscious.

t.panpsychist

>>10816398
Could you give me a brief explanation about your view? Not going to make fun of you

>>10816363
Because they do have a form of intelligence. Most of the water bear's 1000 cells are devoted to nerves.

>>10816363
I saw a man-sized one of these things at a homeless shelter while I was homeless. It looked like a mutant in a leather bag. I couldn't see into the bag because it was about 20ft away, but it pointed its mouth at me and it felt like it was looking at me from inside the bag.

>>10816398
Why is the consciousness of say your hand dissociated from the consciousness of your brain then?

>>10816417
Were you homeless due to schizophrenia?

Insects can have pretty intricate nervous systems.

>>10816381
Bacteria is on the edge

>>10816406
It feels like something to be a rock.

>>10816418
It's not.

>>10816456
I don't experience what it's like to be my hand. You do?

>>10816471
Yes. You don't?

>>10816474
Not everybody faps nonstop anon

>>10816382
Uh-uhhh. Do you guys think that ants don't think?

>>10816363
Consciousness exists on a spectrum. Organisms with higher nervous systems are capable of self-awareness, sentience, and object-permeance. Meanwhile, all organisms with rudimentary nervous systems are capable of basic coordination and senses.

>>10816363
My computer program I wrote displays intelligent behavior. Does that mean it has a consciousness or just that it follows some pre-determined behavior based on code?

For simple animals this is the same as they follow simple predetermined behavior hard-coded in their neuron structures.

>>10816471
You, at the very least, experience the fact that your hand exists, yes?

>>10816382
>So you agree that tardigrades and ants have consciousness? That's a pretty big claim.
What? No it isn't, it's self evident. Don't confuse consciousness with self-awareness. Or with sapience.
All living beings are sentient (they can feel). Not all living beings are self aware or intelligent.

>>10816363
consciousness is a poorly defined parameter

you can't argue about the precision of a concept with error bars that large

>>10816700
>My computer program I wrote displays intelligent behavior.
It does not. It performs computations.

>>10817620
But all matter has consciousness.
What is to say the computer is not a very simple silicon life form?

>>10816363
>if x results from y then why do animals with primitive y have z

>>10816382
Its not a new claim. Jains have made that claim since 3000 years ago. They classify consciousness based upon sensory units.

>>10816382
Hard to say if they have consciousness but it seems that there are incredibly deep parallels between human and insect brains. They seem to have their own versions of most of the important brain parts you get in mammals.

>>10817633
>But all matter has consciousness.
Sure.
>What is to say the computer is not a very simple silicon life form?
It does not meet the requirements for life. You could construct a powerful robot that makes more independent units like itself (reproduction) and even program it to change schematics before every 'copy' attempt to try to emulate hereditariety and variation (and thus evolution) but it still doesn't have a need to metabolize in order to maintain thermodynamic inequilibrium with the Universe (homeostasis).
You can separate a computer/robot from its power source and it can later restart. It doesn't die because it was never alive. If you remove a living beings capacity to extract exergy from the Universe, it is irreversibly destroyed (death).

>>10817676
Consciousness is an overused word with a poor definition. Sentience is much better. All living beings are sentient.

>>10817692
I think his point is about sentience not life. Life isnt necessarily sentient.

>>10816363
Consciousness is supernatural in nature, therefore can't be measured my empirical methodologies. Nervous systems, ect., are merely facilitation and interfacing systems.

>>10817697
>Life isnt necessarily sentient.
All accepted lifeforms are sentient, though. And while a robot may or may not be sentient, it falls out of the definition for life in that it has no metabolism nor a necessity to maintain homeostasis.

>>10817966
Lifeform isnt the issue here though sentience is. You cant say a plant or bacterium is sentient can you?

>>10816363
OP,
#1: Define, in detail, at the neurological level, how 'consciousness', 'self awareness', 'cognition' (i.e. the ability to form thoughts) and other qualities and phenomena associated with the subject, actually *work*.
#2: Demonstrate to me that we can simulate, in a computer, the entire lifecycle, behaviors, and so on, of even the simplest lifeforms, in a computer, using it's actual genome as the 'program'.

If you can do those things, then you're the smartest human to ever live. You also should be able to build working general AI, that walks and talks and can interact with humans like a human would.

Now, since you clearly cannot do any of the above, you must admit you're full of shit, don't know what the hell you're talking about, and are just shitposting for fun, basically wasting everyones' time.

Stay in school, OP, and don't do drugs.

>>10816363
You're conflating intelligence with consciousness, which are two different things. But you're still right. Even worms appear to have consciousness, although very limited consciousness. Consciousness is a spectrum, which only adds to its mystery. Particularly since there doesn't seem to be any hard line or cutoff where living entities have absolute zero consciousness. Even complex biochemical compounds appear to exhibit some level of "awareness" of their surroundings, which is of course is the very behavior that complex organisms have built upon over the course of billions of years of evolution.

>>10818291
>Even worms appear to have consciousness, although very limited consciousness.
I must point out that since we cannot definitely and qualitatively define what 'consciousness' actually *is*, that your statement above is useless.

>>10818297
so are you

>>10816700
Insects are capable of far more than simple, predetermined behaviors.

>>10818290
neither of those are necessary to prove the existence of conscious organisms nor does the second follow from the first or imply the first.

Not even suggesting consciousness is real, I doubt that it is, but you’re retarded if you think either of those things are necessary to make a generalized, weakened version of the claim that awareness of much simpler organisms than us is a real physical phenomena even if it does not qualify as “consciousness” in the usually ill defined sense of special insight into one’s existence and an active participation in a mental life that dynamically changes one’s behavior and perception of the world enabling things like agency and reflection, self knowledge. These are completely unnecessary to make the primary claim that some protist or minuscule animal is experiencing the world and vaguely aware of itself and nature.

>>10817603
/thread

>>10818285
>You cant say a plant or bacterium is sentient can you?
I can because they are.

>>10816363
Q: what is reality?
A: reality must always be real. It is not with forms and names. That which underlies these is the reality. It underlies limitations, being itself limitless. It is not bound. It underlies unrealities, itself being real. Rrality is that which is. It is as it is. It transcends speech. It is beyond the expressions 'existence, non-existence', etc.
The reality which is the mere consciousness that remains when ignorance is destroyed along with knowledge of objects, alone is the Self [atma]. In that Brahma-swarupa [real form of Brahman], which is abundant Self-awareness, there is not the least ignorance...
... The radiance of consiousness-bliss, in the form of one awareness shining equally within and without, is the supreme and blissful primal reality. Its form is silence and it is declared by jnanis to be the final and unobstructable state of true knowledge [jnana].
Know that jnana alone is non-attachment; jnana alone is purity; jnana is the attainment of God; jnana which is devoid of forgetfulness of Self alone is immortality; jnana alone is everything.

>>10819042
Q: What is this awareness and how can one obtain and cultivate it?
A: you are awareness. Awareness is another name for you. Since you are awareness there is no need to attain or cultivate it. All that you have to do is give up being aware of other things, that is of the not-Self. If one gives up being aware of them then pure awareness alone remains, and that is the Self.

>>10819047
Q: Sri Bhagavan speaks of the Heart as the seat of consciousness and as identical with the Self. What does the heart exactly signify?
A: Call it by any name, God, Self, the Heart or the seat of consciousness, it is all the same. The point to be grasped is this, that the Heart means the very core of one's being, the centre, without which there is nothing whatever...
The Heart is not physical, it is spiritual... The Heart is the centre of all. That from which all beingd come into existence is said to be Brahman in the Upanishads. That is the Heart. Brahman is the Heart.

>>10819050
There is only one state, that of consciousness or awareness or existence.The three states of waking, dream and sleep cannot be real. They simply come and go.The real will always exist. The ‘Iâ€:tm: or existence that alone persists in all the three states is real. The other three are not real and so it is not possible to say they have such and such a degree of reality.

We may roughly put it like this.Existence or consciousness is the only reality. Consciousness plus waking, we call waking.Consciousness plus sleep, we call sleep. Consciousness plus dream, we call dream.

Consciousness is the screen on which all the pictures come and go. The screen is real, the pictures are mere shadows on it.Because by long habit we have been regarding these three states as real, we call the state of mere awareness or consciousness as the fourth. There is however no fourth state,but only one state.

>>10819054
Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

>>10819058
We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.

>>10819042
>>10819047
>>10819050
>>10819054
>>10819058
>>10819060
Gtfo of /sci/ with your New Age bullshit. Seriously all this poo in the loo stuff is just whoopy self delusion.

Because it's not purely just a factor with the nervous system. Some other factor must be allowing it awareness possibly exposure to continuous social complexities. If the mirror test is to be believed extremely small organisms with extremely small brains demonstrate self-awareness as seen with three species of ants and the cleaner wrasse fish.

The cleaner wrasse fish is an interesting case because before it was shown to have self awareness it was shown to have better delayed/double yield reward understanding than several primates.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3504063/

>Despite primates renowned dietary complexity and social cognition, including cooperative abilities, we here demonstrate that cleaner wrasse outperform three primate species, capuchin monkeys, chimpanzees and orang-utans, in a foraging task involving a choice between two actions, both of which yield identical immediate rewards, but only one of which yields an additional delayed reward.

>Wild caught adult, but not juvenile, cleaners learned to solve the task quickly and relearned the task when it was reversed. The majority of primates failed to perform above chance after 100 trials, which is in sharp contrast to previous studies showing that primates easily learn to choose an action that yields immediate double rewards compared to an alternative action. In conclusion, the adult cleaners' ability to choose a superior action with initially neutral consequences is likely due to repeated exposure in nature, which leads to specific learned optimal foraging decision rules.

>>10819028
t. retard

>>10816363
They dont appear to have intelligence, they do have intelligence. They are aware, but not as aware as we are. Ants can count and make complex decisions.

>>10816471
I experience touch signals passed along the nerves of my hand back to my brain.

Why should it's consciousness be composite with my brain's? Why doesn't it have a local consciousness of its own? If I sever it, or crack two rocks apart, both parts should be conscious, right?

>>10819241
meant to reply to
>>10816474

>>10819028
If you make sentience as broad as "responds to stimulus" it's worthless. It'd apply to your phone for god's sake. It should be reserved for animals.

>>10816363
what the fuck does consciousness have to do with intelligence? one can exist without the other, I mean you are conscious.

>>10816363
Quorum sensing =/= consciousness

Plants are also conscious actually.

And of course /sci/ will bitch about this statement but so are rocks and even atoms and photons.

>>10816420
You've never seen otherworldly entities? You mock us but it is real I have seen many and speak with them on a daily basis. I will never take any of your fucking medication you rat.

>>10817692
>You can separate a computer/robot from its power source and it can later restart. It doesn't die because it was never alive.
Exactly. So many people say what happens to a program when you shut off a computer but a program is actually just an abstraction on a physical system producing physical reactions in your monitor that are meaningful to you. It is just a personification to claim a program is alive and that you "kill" it when it hangs or whatever. Completely different from a human being who really is an entity that exists and is definitely not merely the body since the body can be damaged and changed while the human is the same underneath. It's a fundamental difference between software and consciousness.

>>10816363
Looks like a foreskin

>>10816417
Can confirm. Same thing happened to me.

>>10816363
consciousness=Duat=the Devil
it has nothing to do with your body

>>10816418

There's this method in meditation where you can move your "point of consciousness" from in your head/behind your eyes to any arbitrary location. Look it up.

I did it but only got it to my mouth and it was too weird.

>>10816406
Information = consciousness

>>10819364
Feeling =/= responding to stimulus

>>10821125
information integration*

>>10816363
>consciousness = intelligence
Brainlet

consciousness is a quantum state.. i always wondered if you copied yourself would you feel like you could control two bodies or something? But if there is a quantum aspect (as in having superposition) you couldn't clone a consciousness but you could teleport it, like into a matrix world, or even if our brains were mostly classical computed but used a small quantum computer to produce a "seed" like how cryptography uses seed phrases then it would take longer than the age of the universe possibly to clone a consciousness which would make sense if the universe repeats itself and it takes 1000000 trillion years for a person to be reincarnated into a new universe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem

also entanglement might provide an explanation of psychic phenomena like feeling someone stare at you which has been experimentally verified by multiple people

https://youtu.be/3WXTX0IUaOg

>>10816373
why this no get no fucking attention stoopid fukking science niggars?

Can you elaborate more on this simplicity you speak of? I loves me some simplicity.

>>10816700
>intelligent behavior
without a definition of "intelligent behaviour" there can be no discussion

>>10816363
intelligence =/= consciousness

>>10820359
Based Schizo poster

>>10816381
Consciousness of ones self

>>10822122
Whoops i meant being aware of ones self

>>10818297
Ability to have subjectivity in observations of the world around you, any other questions?

You never ask, what is the source of God? You know that that question is going to lead into an infinite regress. God is the source of existence, but you never ask what is the source of God. Those who have asked are thought to be atheists, and they are condemned: "You are asking an absurd question." They are not asking an absurd question. They are simply making your God himself an absurdity.

The religions have been saying that existence cannot be without a creator; nothing can be without a creator - that has been the argument of all the religions for centuries. But then the question naturally arises to any intelligent mind that if everything needs a creator, then God must also need a creator.

But then there is no end. God number one is created by God number two. God number two is created by God number three _ Where are you going to stop? There is no terminus. The train goes on and on. And finally you will become so tired.

People like Gautam Buddha, who had a greater clarity than anybody else ever had, say that bringing God in is in itself absurd. Existence has always been here. Nobody has created it, and nobody can destroy it. But that does not mean that Gautam Buddha is an atheist. It simply means he has a more scientific and less mythological approach.

He says existence consists of consciousness. Existence itself is made of consciousness. And consciousness has always been here, is here, will be here. It can be asleep, it can be awake, but it is consciousness all the same.

When it is asleep you work blindly, unconsciously. When it becomes awake you are enlightened.

But there is no source of consciousness, Prem Komal.

Consciousness itself is the very foundation of the whole existence. Nothing is deeper than that. You cannot go beyond consciousness.

>>10822164
Modern physics has discovered one of the greatest things ever discovered, and that is: matter is energy. That is the greatest contribution of Albert Einstein
to humanity: e is equal to mc squared, matter is energy. Matter only appears; otherwise there is no such thing as matter. Nothing is solid. Even the solid rock is a pulsating energy, even the solid rock is as much energy as the roaring ocean. The waves that are arising in the solid rock cannot be seen because they are very subtle, but the rock is waving, pulsating, breathing; it is alive.

Friedrich Nietzsche has declared that God is dead. God is not dead _ on the contrary, what has happened is that matter is dead. Matter has been found not to exist at all. This insight into matter brings modern physics very close to mysticism, very close. For the first time the scientist and the mystic are coming very close, almost holding hands.

Eddington, one of the greatest scientists of this age, has said, "We used to think that matter is a thing; now it is no more so. Matter is more like a thought than like a thing."

Existence is energy. Science has discovered that the observed is energy, the object is energy. Down through the ages, at least for five thousand years, it has been known that the other polarity _ the subject, the observer, consciousness _ is energy.

>>10822164
>what is the source of God?
It is simple. God is the here and now. There is no causality, no such thing as time or anything else of that nature. Causality and time are products of thought. There is only the present moment which is God or the spirit. The past and future don't truly exist they never existed.