Hm. I agree there's no obvious threshold. But I think (especially with Dave's stories)
there is a threshold there somewhere. Homeostasis is inadequate, which is why I mentioned
allostasis/aspiration/wants/desires. It's not clear to me whether that line also cuts
teleo[no|dyna]mics in half. But I think so. I don't think consciousness requires
intentionality or purpose, only fusion/reduction. Whether both purpose and consciousness
are part of the same hierarchy or not is, I think, an open question. Maybe purpose
requires consciousness? But I'm pretty sure consciousness does not require purpose. This
would be true in both Dave's deep fusion of psychedelic experiences or my more banal
fusion of being "in the zone" for some skillful activity.
However, I do NOT think they are members of a strict hierarchy. I think you can
have purpose without consciousness and consciousness without purpose. They're
not necessarily orthogonal, but loosely coupled in some way. So I'd prefer to
classify organisms with both features. An amoeba might be teleonomic but not
conscious. A mouse is both teleonomic and conscious. A hippie trippin' on a
hero dose of Ψ may be conscious but not teleonomic.
On 7/25/24 08:54, steve smith wrote:
Glen -
All animalia have closed neural-sensorimotor loops and all life have chem-bio
sensorimotor loops?
So the "fusion" of which you speak, if we want to reserve "consciousness" for
humans, human-familiars (pets, other domesticates, human-tolerant wild animals), charismatic
animals (the ones we are fascinated with, ranging from polar bears and whales to elephants and
dugongs and penguins, and octupii and maybe sharks and jellyfish).
I don't *want* to do this, but I think it is a human bias to see things that
are familiar to them (warm blooded predators within an order of magnitude of
their own size?)
The automated catching of objects and DaveW's assertion that there are multiple
selves/consciousnesses involved was apt IMO... I'd want to grant ganglia, plexuses, the
whole PNS to have it's own "consciousness" in the strong sense of what we see
tentacled things to do. I've watched felines and primates whose *tails* very much seem
to have a life of their own. Subservient or deferential to the brain-centric self, but
nevertheless pretty damn autonomous.
In the spirit of splitting hairs of distinction into finer hairs, I don't see an obvious "threshold of
consciousness", only an "horizon" of *recognizeable to me* consciousness. I can project conscious-like
presence onto the giant volcanic plug nearby known broadly as "Black Mesa" but it is a much bigger stretch
for me to do this with a random stone or pebble I might pick up off the ground... on the other hand, a particularly
interesting one I might set in a place of prominence (on a fencepost, a windowsill, a shrine) it becomes more and more
and more familiar to me as I visit with my sensorium and the "mind" behind it... my own consciousness to wit?
Harping on the Deacontionary: Any partition of the universe which exhibits
teleodynamics would be conscious under that programme. Homeodynamics (that
which keeps a pebble a pebble as it tumbles and erodes) and morphodynamics
(that which keeps a river channel or a sand dune consistently itselve under the
changeout of all parts?)
I don't disagree that "conciousness" is in the "fusion" only want to split hairs or elaborate on the degrees
and/or styles of said "fusion" and that perhaps the "style" of fusion that my favorite tree outside my window
is engaging in constantly as it absorbs nutrients through its roots, breathes CO2/O2 in/out of it's leaves, transforms
electromagnetic energy (sunlight) into chemical energy (hydrocarbon bonds) and ultimately things like cellulose, is yet more
conscious than the rivercourse of the Rio Grande nearby managing to carve a series of channels while remaining roughly "the
Rio Grande" for millenia.
Mumble,
- Steve
On 7/25/24 7:29 AM, glen wrote:
I disagree the theme is "pausing between two possibilities". I view the theme
as a *fusion* of sensory input. Sometimes, the sensory fusion appears to be intentionally
stanced as a choice/decision. But that's not the case in the itch transfer, hat-catching,
or satiety examples. Those are clearly examples of the fusion of high dimensional
environmental data.
Consciousness is that *fusion*. Another example is when someone wakes up from anesthesia, when you "see" that
"someone is home". They've become conscious. They're now taking in a bunch of data from the environment and
fusing it, making sense of it. I have a story akin to that, too. Before my mom got her pacemaker put in, she'd been in
the ICU for a few days and had ICU delirium. She played cards with illusory people, kept telling me there was a man
behind me, asking me what the man was doing there, etc. This is a kind of consciousness, but an incomplete kind. When
she would "wake up" from that delirium, you could see that she was now fully "home", conscious,
competently fusing the incoming data.
On 7/24/24 18:46, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
a theme that seems to run through these examples is that the animal pauses between two
possibilities. we are tempted to understand these behaviors in terms of the
consideration of alternatives, ...[snip]... just as you cat instead of doing either of
the two things you might expect, hovers between the two, making what the ethologists
would call "intention movements" in either direction as the pressure leaks out.
But what calls for an explanation in both cases is the violation of the
observer's expectations.
--
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