[FRIAM] Self-Consciousness, experience and metaphysics

[Nicholas Thompson]

David,

I am having trouble with the fusion metaphor. I can think of two kinds of fusions that might be operating here: a bunch of stuff is pushed together at very high velocity, and there is a giant bang. Alternatively, a bunch of different substances Are heated to a high temperature and form a piece of slag. Is either these metaphors appropriate to your understanding? Or are you operating with a different one? 
Sent from my Dumb Phone

On Jul 25, 2024, at 11:55 AM, steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> 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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