[FRIAM] Self-Consciousness, experience and metaphysics

[steve smith]

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.
>
>