kennyc wrote:zoon wrote:In the OP you appeared to agree with Michio Kaku that a thermostat has some awareness, would you argue that thermostats have more in common with definitely living things than viruses do?
I agree with him that a thermostat is an excellent example of the function of consciousness, I don't think either he or I said it was 'aware' but in fact it is 'aware' of its environment. That is its purpose to monitor and use sensory input to provide feedback to the heating/cooling system. In that same way consciousness and self-consciousness do at a much higher level for humans and other animals. In plants and at lower levels of life - bacteria, viruses if they are even considered alive have feedback mechanisms that provide awareness of their environment -- as I said above my position is that awareness is inherent and essential to being alive whether it is a single cell, a bacteria, a sponge or a human.
Also as I said, some don't even consider viruses as living -- I don't really have an opinion but because they consist of DNA which is identical in type to other living things I'd say they are closer to living than a thermostat is, but really none of that is really even relevant to awareness, consciousness, etc.
Your position is that “awareness is inherent and essential to being alive”, but in scientific terms is it your position that a scientist studying a living creature would find anything besides complex feedback loops which evolved through natural selection and which can be entirely described in terms of the laws of physics? Would you expect to find any physical activity of living things which can only be explained through an inner awareness?
My position is in some ways similar to yours, even though I don’t think awareness actually exists in anything. I think that awareness is something that human brains attribute to other humans (and ourselves), but we also attribute awareness readily to other living things. So all humans tend to agree that living things have awareness, even though the agreement is because our brains have evolved to attribute awareness, not because it’s actually there. In that sense, in my view, awareness has a kind of virtual objective reality, like rainbows, it’s a perceptual illusion which we all share. This is what Graziano was saying in the quote in my post
#538 above.
kennyc wrote:zoon wrote:A separate question: leaving aside any question of what does or does not actually have consciousness/ awareness, would you agree with Graziano (as I read him in the book Consciousness and the Social Brain) that the explicit attribution of consciousness to others or to self is a trait which depends on the social mechanisms of Theory of Mind?
.....
another trick question.
I already said above that certainly social interaction and attributing consciousness/selfness to others is something we do as social animals and is very important to our social interaction and evolutionary survival, but I see it as something at a much higher level than consciousness or even self consciousness. We must first be aware of ourselves as an individual before we can say there are other individuals.
What I ask you is how and why do you think we do this? What is its origin, what is its original face?
Again, I agree with you in that the complexity of brain processes which are capable of attributing awareness is far greater than the complexity which is needed for something to have awareness attributed to it. We may attribute some sort of awareness to
amoebae or paramecia (it’s difficult not to feel sympathy sometimes), but they are unlikely to attribute any to us.
I’m not at all sure that we do need to be aware of ourselves as individuals before being aware of others as individuals. The evidence from psychologists who study the development of young children suggests that both of these abilities develop together; it’s the maturation of the brain processes that evolved to manage social interaction which enables the growing child to understand itself as a person with thoughts. A representative 2010 article is
here (my underlining):
Astington and Edward wrote:A crucial development occurs around 4 years of age when children realize that thoughts in the mind may not be true. For example, children are allowed to discover that a familiar candy box actually contains pencils, and then are asked what their friend will think is in the box, before looking inside it. Three-year-olds assume that the friend will know it has pencils inside, just as they now do, but 4-year-olds recognize that the friend will be tricked, just as they were. Three-year-olds also do not remember that their own belief has changed. If the pencils are put back in the box and they are asked what they thought was inside before opening it, they'll say "pencils" not "candy" but 4-year-olds remember they thought it was candy. That is, 3-year-olds are not simply egocentric, i.e., thinking everyone knows what they know, rather, they come to understand their own minds and those of other people at the same time. By the age of 4 of 5 years, children realize that people talk and act on the basis of the way they think the world is, even when their thoughts do not reflect the real situation, and so they will not be surprised if their uninformed friend looks for candy in the box they know has pencils inside.
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