GrahamH wrote:CharlieM wrote:In speaking about robots and macromolecular machines, Dennett is transferring modern, human, Western consciousness to a time long before it came into existence. This is unacceptable anthropomorphism.
No, he isn't. He is suggesting that consciousness is an activity of some such 'robots', that consciousness and subjective phenomena depend on that function and therefore, conciousness and perception does not pre-date that function. The formation of the constituent parts of the robot function can, of course, pre-date the the performance of the function.
Dennett is not projecting consciousness to a time before it came into existence.
Idealism and mind-dependent world is a topic for discussion, but not in this forum of psychology and neuroscience.
He is assuming that robot-like enitities and macromolecular machines predate human consciousness, but these things are the product of human consciousness, they are our "collective representations". We humans look at nature and aspects of it and do what we always do. We project our cultural trends onto nature and imagine that we are apprehending objective reality. In the age of heavy industry and commercial competition animals were mechanical machines competing for their place in the system, in the age of computers and microchips life is the product of information storage systems and networks of data retrieval. Feedback systems are coming into their own in human technology so consciousness must be nothing but feedback loops.
Saul Bellow:
We are well supplied with interesting writers, but Owen Barfield is not content to be merely interesting. His ambition is to set us free. Free from what? From the prison we have made for ourselves by our ways of knowing, our limited and false habits of thought, our "common sense." These, he convincingly argues, have produced a "world of outsides with no insides to them," a brittle surface world, an object world in which we ourselves are mere objects. It is not only what we perceive but also what we fail to perceive that determines the quality of the world we live in, and what we have collectively chosen not to perceive is the full reality of consciousness, the "inside" of everything that exists.
And from
owenbarfield.org:
Though questions of the nature and evolution of consciousness lie at the heart of every word Owen Barfield wrote, he acknowledges the extreme difficulty of understanding the nature of consciousness at all...
He knew, too, that the assumption “that, because consciousness is contingent on a physical organism, it must be the product of such an organism” (Rediscovery of Meaning 31), though currently common sense, must be incorrect, for “[Consciousness] resembles a spark located within the brain much less than it resembles a diffused light focused into the whole body from without” (Language, Evolution of Consciousness, and the Recovery of Human Meaning).
And he was firmly convinced that the question of consciousness is much more than an abstruse epistemological dilemma, for:
Barfield:
If civilization is to be saved, people must come more and more to realize that our consciousness is not something spatially enclosed in the skin or in the skull or in the brain; that it is not only our inside, but the inside of the world as a whole. That people should not merely be able to propound as a theory . . . but that it should become more and more their actual experience. . . . That, and also the overcoming of the total obsession there is today, with the Darwinian view of evolution—of consciousness or mind having emerged from a material, but entirely unconscious universe. Putting it very shortly, to realize, not simply as a theory but as a conviction of common sense, that in the history of the world, matter has emerged from mind and not mind from matter.
Our awareness of self comes through the fact that we have the concept of our subjectivity reflected against the concept of the objective world out there. But our experience of self is not confined to our thinking brains. If I stub my toe I know that my sense of self extends right down to my feet at the very least.
If Kaku can have a theory of consciousness then so can I. My theory is that animals do have self-consciousness just as humans do. But animal self-consciousness is at the level of the group, the species or the kind. It is not at the level of the individual as in humans although the closer an animal's intelligence approaches human intelligence then the closer its consciousness approaches awareness of individual self. Exceptional individual animals may display the beginnings of self-consciousness as has been observed in a few individuals. Termite mounds and natural beehives reveal signs of being intelligently designed with their advanced air conditioning systems. In these cases the intelligent entity responsible for the design is the colony and the individual insects are better regarded as the organs of this entity. Instinctive behaviour points to group intelligence and learned behaviour points to individual intelligence. The interesting thing about a dung beetle is its instinctive behaviour which is common to the group. The interesting thing about humans is our learned behaviour and this determines our individual biographies of which no two are the same.
When it comes to consciousness Kaku places humans at the highest level, I place humans, not at the highest, but at the most condensed.
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