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I got an hour and a half of sleep so I can tell you for a fact that no. Consciousness is not currently everywhere
I don’t understand the author’s basic premise, or even his definitions. To me, consciousness is the actual “spark of life” that exists in all creatures. When they die, that spark leaves, and they no longer have consciousness.
Experience is an entirely different thing.
To me, life=consciousness is just too simple of a definition. Is a sponge conscious? How about a plant? How about a single bacteria cell?
I feel there is a difference between something making a choice in their actions, or merely reacting to external stimuli. That line is blurry, and there’s a lot more creatures that fall on the conscious side than we used to think, but there are definitely creatures that don’t. You’ll never be able to convince me that something like a jellyfish or a salp is a conscious creature.
There isn’t just a blurry line between choice and reaction, there’s also differences in consciousness itself. There’s low forms of consciousness and high forms of consciousness. Being wasted for example alters it, and can even make you unconscious.
I know what you’re thinking. No, do not put it in that hole!!!
This is embarrassing mysticism for a journal from a school of science. We may as well be taking about souls and spirits and the aether. In the same way that LLM hype (lately in service of scammy marketing) has generated irrational spiritual believers in coming machine god it has also caused opponents to lose their minds and make absolute statements about how nature must have some ephemeral essence that sets it apart from the artificial.
Experience is in unexpected places, including in all animals, large and small, and perhaps even in brute matter itself. But consciousness is not in digital computers running software, even when they speak in tongues. Ever-more powerful machines will trade in fake consciousness, which will, perhaps, fool most. But precisely because of the looming confrontation between natural, evolved and artificial, engineered intelligence, it is absolutely essential to assert the central role of feeling to a lived life.
The whole thing’s a misframing-problem:
IF mind-ness ISN’T a property of universe, as Time & Space are,
THEN matter creates mind-ness from nothing, in a universe which doesn’t innately contain mind.
That is Scientism’s view.
The fact that entanglement is MEASURED to not have any information-transfer speed-limit proves that entanglement isn’t moving through space!
It’s in a dimension perpendicular to space.
Entanglement & knowing both are immaterial, & both alter the behavior of matter: they are the same substance, just at different scales.
Identically, quantum-probability-wave & will both are immaterial properties, & both alter the behavior of matter: ditto.
The force which makes child-violinists, like Einstein, have a knob grown-into their right-motor-control-strips, in their brains, isn’t electromagnetic, gravitational, or nuclear, it is mind, it is the systematic alteration of the atomic-probability-waves that build that portion of those brains. Unconscious-mind is mind, just as conscious mind is.
( & all who adamantly insist that there is no proof that entanglement works at any scale greater than the atomic: entanglement’s proven to distances of over 100-km, & has been for years. Ignoring/disallowing that fact for sake of belief is ideology/scientism, not evidence-based science )
Matter only amplifies universally-latent mind.
Mind, Time, & Space ( I don’t mean mind-as-in-cognition-or-awareness, I mean the fundamental that is underlying awareness, that also is underlying unconscious-ignorance )
IF mind-ness IS a property of universe, as Time & Space are,
THEN matter’s arrangement only amplifies it, or amplifies some subset-of-its-spectrum [ or equivalent ], not creating-it-from-nothing-in-a-universe-not-containing-mind.
Then evolution’s having begun makes sense.
If mind never existed until after it evolved its basis, to sufficient complexity, then you’ve got a permanent & absolute catch-22:
evolution couldn’t happen until after it had evolved.
Ideological idiocy.
What is the cause of the molecular-process/behavior difference between a disintegrating-corpse vs a growing-organism?
It certainly isn’t “a corpse of a human doesn’t have the same neutrons, or protons, or electrons”, is it?
It isn’t “they have different atoms in them”, either.
It isn’t “the atoms are arranged differently, & it is the arrangement which decides whether something is alive, or not”, either. ( what force-in-physics would “arrangement” produce?? )
What is the cause of the difference in atomic behavior??
Mind.
Unconscious mind still is mind.
The idiocy/prejudice of insisting, as Scientism does, that proving that unconscious-mind has will somehow “proves that free [ conscious ] will doesn’t exist”…
Proving that white swans exist doesn’t prove that Australian black swans don’t exist.
Proving that unconscious-mind’s will exists doesn’t prove that conscious-mind’s will doesn’t exist.
The existence of aerospace engineering proves that will has to exist!
( unconscious-mind tends to be the lower-forebrain’s imprint->reaction system, whereas considered-reasoning, including much programming, is upper-forebrain.
The existence & operation of 1 circuit doesn’t somehow “prove” that no other circuit exists.
But ideologies are ideologies, of course, & should be expected to behave as ideologies do, right? )
I find the quote you provided of the article to be … sufficiently mushy-minded that I don’t want to read any more of that article.
Thank you for providing it.
_ /\ _
PS: for all who axiomatically know that mind isn’t a property of universe, as time & space are, that instead it is created from nothing by specific evolved arrangements of matter, feel free to denigrate, block, etc, all I say, everywhere:
I’ve learned that axiom-based “science” which identifies as “evidence-based”, is a major prejudice among this world ( I grew up in it, & was proud of embodying it, for membership in that exclusive culture, when I was young ).
Hofstadter’s “Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” demonstrated that formal-systems, ideologies, prejudices, & religions, all axiom-based, are incapable of knowing any meaning that universe is asserting if it contradicts the axioms of the knower:
the only “valid” evidence is authorized by the already-believed-in axioms.
Which makes-obvious a rule that differentiates actual Science from Scientism:
IF one’s worldview outranks evidence, THEN no matter what one “identifies” as, one isn’t doing Science, but ideology.
IF one’s worldview keeps getting rewritten as universe falsifies one’s axioms, THEN one’s adapting is itself showing that one is doing, being-loyal-to, actual Science.
That mind is real, in spite of what physicalism/materialism/existentialism believes-in, is testable:
both cities & aerospace-engineering wouldn’t exist if mind weren’t significantly altering the behavior of matter.
That mind is an instrument which can be refined, polished, made clear-of-obscurations, etc, is something the Hindus & Buddhists both have been insisting for millenia.
To force the mind into tranquility, so that its deformities/ignorances/assumptions/addictions are forced to dissipate from it, allowing it to become deeper, clearer, stiller…
But, of course, all who hold it to be axiomatically valid that mind can’t possibly be improved by any such thing, know what they know…
& they’ve zero need to ever honestly do any experiment, to test what they know, of course…
Want an experiment?
https://www.drawright.com/before-after
SEE the difference-in-mind-substance that 5 DAYS of her training can do to someone’s mind.
Invest in her book “Draing on the Right Side of the Brain: the 4th Definitive edition”, & some charcoals-assortment, toothy paper, kneaded eraser, etc, & do the experiment, yourself, & discover if there’s a kind-of-mind, kind-of-knowing, that Scientism prohibits from being real, or valid…
A wordless kind of mind, that is total, at-once, & makes one’s health measurably improve, if one intentionally makes it a significant part of one’s life…
Once one does that experiment ( I’m a braindamaged autistic: it took me 3 years, not 5 days, to get far-enough to understand the experience she’s aiming people into ), there is no going back: one’s worldview is forced into changing, by evidence.
The whole “BEing” vs “mechanism/cognition” contrast gets amplified up to 11, at least, by the experience…
Anyways, for anybody who lives to earn more understandings, of greater & greater diversity, that experiment is the greatest gift your life is likely to know, in whatever year you earn her book’s meanings.
Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen.
_ /\ _
Why are you asking me? I dunno, man, I dunno if I’m even conscious half the time
I’m reminded of when I offered a small jar of honey to a wild beehive. My neighbor was watching and said they all moved differently when I was there. I told her we shared a moment on the same wavelength, shared consciousness is possible for all life.
You ever see the back of a twenty dollar bill… on weed? Oh, there’s some crazy shit, man
Consciousness is esoteric but easily understood if we change the question to “What are we conscious of?” In order to answer that we need a feedback loop. I am conscious of the temperature in the room I am in but I am only aware that other buildings near me have rooms that have some temperature; I do not know if it is hot or cold in them. I am not conscious of the comfort state of those rooms. Another example is that I am aware of FM radio waves around me but I’m not conscious of them. If they all disappeared suddenly I’d have no idea unless there was a feedback loop such as an FM radio on at the time. So consciousness is always specific to feedback. Now let’s factor in autonomy which is required to react to the feedback loop. If I am conscious I am cold in a room I can take action and get a jacket or blanket. Environmental Cause -> Feedback -> Reaction -> Repeat. This doesn’t work for awareness. I might be aware of the temperature but if I do not ‘feel’ cold then my reaction may not be appropriate. I could ‘hallucinate’ and do the wrong thing; leading me to freeze to death. You can see a natural example of this in people with congenital insensitivity to pain, (CIP) is a rare genetic disorder characterized by the inability to perceive physical pain. These people cannot feel any physical pain. People with this condition might very well freeze to death because there is no pain associated with it for them. They are not conscious of the problem! I’m gonna summarize. Consciousness is the general term we give to being generally aware of our environment through feedback loops. There is no such a thing as complete consciousness because there are attributes of the universe you cannot percieve directly or indirectly (this indirect part is always subject to change)
So you’re saying that consciousness is just how we react to our senses. If I can’t sense something then I am not conscious of it and if I am not conscious of everything then a greater consciousness doesn’t exist. What if, like all our senses, consciousness is gradient? Some people have super taste, some people wear glasses. Maybe, some people have a more powerful sense that can perceive things most of us can’t, like thoughts or intentions from other things.
We don’t need a metabolism for consciousness.
At it’s simpliest level it can just be aromatic rings arranging themselves so that they vibrate in a “good” way compared to a “bad” way.
That doesn’t mean AI can be conscious though, for Silicon to vibrate it needs to be in acid. That’s why the aliens in Alien are silicon based with acidic blood.
So we hypothetically could create artificial consciousness, it’s just we’re not going down a path that can end in that with current AI.
All of this sounds very magical and confident and I’m not informed well enough to refute it, but I also can’t tell if it’s satire or nah. 😆
Physics has been getting turned on it’s head the past 3-5 years, but even before that when you start looking too close at it, you start sounding like a hippie fairy tale.
Stuart Hammeroff and Roger Penrose are kind of the experts on consciousness, and a lot of the stuff they’ve been saying for decades is finally starting to be proven true. Like, barely a year ago we found out how quantum superposition can be maintained in a human brain, for the longest time that’s why no one listened to them, their theory required that, and it was thought to be impossible.
But if you want to go down the rabbit hole. You start with those two.
https://hameroff.arizona.edu/research-overview/orch-or
https://scientificandmedical.net/roger-penrose-on-consciousness/
But Penrose was the guy working with Hawking to prove Einstein’s big stuff. And before that he was sending MC Escher ideas and I itial sketches, like those never ending stairs.
Dude is legitimately the smartest living human and he’s spent the last 30 years looking into this stuff as a hobby. It’s really the only reason we know anything about consciousness. A once in a century genius retired early and wanted to keep busy for the next 30 years
That’s an interesting theory I haven’t encountered before, thanks for sharing!
However, I’m not finding anything that suggests to me that Orch OR is really anything more than Penrose catching Nobelitis.
Looking at some of those recent “big results”:
- Microtubule-Stabilizer Epothilone B Delays Anesthetic-Induced Unconsciousness in Rats is making a huge leap from “inhibiting basic cell functions results in delayed offset of anesthesia” to “quantum brain hypothesis proved!!!”. It’s a very cool result with important implications, but I would be very surprised if there isn’t already a well proven existing mechanism to explain the result. If I were to bet it would be related to axonal transport, but that’s largely speculative on my part.
- Ultraviolet Superradiance from Mega-Networks of Tryptophan in Biological Architectures is much closer to the kind of experimental result I’d expect, but describes an optical communication medium, not a quantum one. It might have some important implications in biophotonics but that’s also a theory worthy of hefty skepticism.
In summary, carry on you crazy bastards! But I don’t think you can make any difinitive claims about consciousness and certainly wouldn’t consider Stuart Hammeroff and Roger Penrose “the experts on consciousness” especially with how poorly defined and nebulous the concept is.
for Silicon to vibrate it needs to be in acid
I know it’s a shitpost but silicon dioxide, which is grown on top of the silicon wafer during manufacturing, is one of the most commonly used piezoelectrics. Every clock and oscillating signal in modern electronics is due to ‘vibrating silicon’.
Chemistry is definitely my weak suit, but I think it’s something about how silicon can arrange in an aromatic ring, and then interacting with each other
There’s silobenzine rings, but I think for a fully silicon one, it would need suspended in an acid so they can interact and (literally) vibrate as a group.
But I think in general, you’re talking about on a macro real world level, and I’m talking about some teeny tiny Ant-Man and the Wasp level shit.
Like, 6-8 silicon atoms hooked up together is going to behavior differently than a lump of a compound contraining other elements…
for a fully silicon one, it would need suspended in an acid so they can interact and (literally) vibrate as a group.
I think there’s something more that you’re trying to communicate here but I’m unsure of what it is. Getting silicon, or semiconductors more generally, to “literally vibrate as a group” is the basis of a significant amount of analog electronics, MEMS, NEMS, etc. most notably in RF signal chains and the like. Do you have a link to where this comes from or something?
you’re talking about on a macro real world level
We’re talking at about the same scale of microtubules with 101 nm feature size and 101 um component size. I used the example I did because it scales nicely to real world level where most people will have encountered it and so be somewhat familiar with. The primary differences I see are of dimension (semiconductor manufacturing methods can’t do “true 3d”) and of medium.
lump of a compound contraining other elements
That’s how silicon semiconductors work and how that “semi” part gets controlled.
Yes
A bee finding its way home is like my phone GPS plotting the way back. My phone doesn’t “feel” or “experience” being lost. It just does what it’s built to do.
Calling consciousness experiencing things to then apply it to everything just feels like a rebrand to make it fit. An interesting read, but until we can accurately measure how to perform a test on a rock to see if it experiences anything, I don’t think it has a good scientific basis.
Like, how can we ignore awareness of self? A dog can experience pain from an infected tooth, but it can’t theorize as to why it happened. Sure, there can be evolutionary traits or learned behaviour, but it’s not aware of the bigger picture. They are always just “in the moment” and act on internal and external stimuli.
How do you know a dog is only ever “in the moment”? Dogs are quite complex and inteligent animals. What makes you think they’re not aware?
Also why are we saying in the moment doesn’t count as conciousness. You can argue that being present in the here and now is one of the most concious experiences we can have.
Because being aware of oneself in the past, present and future all at the same time allows us to view and theorise about our impact on ourselves and our surroundings. Animals don’t do this, they run on stimuli and instinct and don’t stop to theorise whether they are hungry or they got stomach ache.
edit: I wanted to say humans have an internal voice, but not all humans do so while it’s a symptom of consciousness, I don’t think an internal voice is the cause/reason
I’m always a little skeptical of anyone who denies conciousness / sentience to animals. We all do stuff based on stimuli.
Also there are layers to conciousness. If you want to make an argument that a fish doesn’t have the same level of higher thought as a human I would agree with you depending on the type of fish, but to assume something operating on a more base level isn’t having their own version of a concious experience is arrogant. Just because we don’t have perfect empirical evidence does not mean it’s not happening; we may need different measuring devices.
Seems like you’re talking about metacognition. Not sure that’s required for consciousness.
Yes, exactly. I find that that is what distinguishes us from animals. “I am happy because of this cool new toy that I got gifted to me because it’s my birthday” versus “I am happy because I’m playing with this toy”
The exact kind of information processing is not necessarily relevant to predicting whether something is conscious. And to talk about animals in general while not including humans is extremely vague and misleading. The concept of other animals than humans being completely instinct driven is outdated. That said, there’s no reason to link being instinct driven to lacking consciousness.
Dogs can be intelligent but that doesn’t have to be linked to consciousness or awareness of self. See dolphins and how dogs and other animals react to their reflection.
Also, dogs are domesticated, so they don’t just run on pure instinct. Selective breeding for traits is a thing, so wild animals (like bees as described in the article) is what I’m basing it on.
The reflextion test is overestimated. It won’t really tell you much about self-awareness with either result.
Insects are a lot different from mammals. The further the organism is from us genetically, the harder it is to estimate anything about the way it experiences the world. It is reasonable to think there is as much diversity as there is in physical traits.
