Defining Consciousness

Define consciousness. Keep in mind that your definition of consciousness has to withstand the criticism of other persons.

Neurons analyzing information from outside via electrical impulses taken to higher level to the point where the neurons now create a unified mind.

I believe it to, simply, be the awareness of the self in a physical form. I can't think of a organism that, in some way, has no recognition of itself.

So if you had sensory input from another place, say a room in Madagascar where there was a mannequin with a camera, microphone, and nanomemes that could transmit tactile and olfactory information to the room you are in, would that qualify as borderline bilocation? If you became fully plugged in to these sensory inputs would you be in Madagascar? If you were only plugged into the sensory input from that room enough that you could evenly split your attention between it and the sensory input of your current Material body, would that be literal bilocation - an idea Materialists have always ridiculed?

>begrudgingly admit consciousness cannot be reduced to Material sensory input
>begrudgingly admit bilocation is possible in a Materialist model

hmmmmm

He has a point there. There are plenty of cases in which stimuli are responded to in an intelligent manner by the robokind

Forgot to beg the question.

"Do the robokind experience consciousness?"

im not sure there can be a consistent definiton of consciousness because it is reducible to parts that by themselves might not necessarily entail consciousness and our own perception of it is completely subjective right now. I think its probably going to be one of those things as well where theres no discrete way of separating consciousness and non-consciousness.

if i was to say, i would say its when a system can infer the highest abstraction of its own structure defined by a markov blanket and the interoceptive and exteroceptive signals that furnish it.

So would experiencing two sensory inputs from two different places qualify as bilocation?

>Bilocation, or sometimes multilocation, is an alleged psychic or miraculous ability

Have you stumbled into vouching for miracles?

Consciousness is the recognition of one's own existence.

It is probably an emergent property rather than an inherent ability

It is extremely absurd to use consciousness to criticize consciousness. You need an out force or authority to make that call. And no I'm not talking about the old white man in the clouds.

you can use science to criticise it

You can use the zinger to criticize the dictionary?

The combination the present state of all forms of perception a creature has.

>not using logic to reject someone's definition of consciousness

please explain

>would that qualify as borderline bilocation?

No, why would it? When I look a picture of a dog, I'm not actually in the presence of a dog.

>If you were only plugged into the sensory input from that room enough that you could evenly split your attention between it and the sensory input of your current Material body, would that be literal bilocation

Your consciousness is located in your head. It doesn't matter if your sense are feeding you what's in your immediate surroundings or Madagascar, you may have the illusion of being in Madagascar but you are not.

He's trying to claim that the dictionary definition of a word is prescriptive, when of course it is merely descriptive.

No I mean using Science - a very small part of Consciousness - to criticize or attempt to explore Consciousness.

Science isn't part of consciousness except in the trivial solipsistic sense.

Even in the last part of the "Scientific" process, the publication of results and their interpretation are at the mercy of people's agency. This is to say nothing of the whole process by which "Objective" data comes to be.

That doesn't make it part of consciousness. Science is a method and the body of data accumulated using that method, consciousness is a process in your brain. See how those aren't the same thing?

>This is to say nothing of the whole process by which "Objective" data comes to be.

So yes, you ARE going the trivial solipsism route? In that case I have nothing to say to you, since you can't prove to me that you even exist :^)

If I am completely plugged in to the sensory information received from somewhere else, and if the information received through my Material body was somehow overridden for the most part, what would make you say I am not somewhere else as long as you claim Consciousness is generated in the Material brain as a secondary process to the input of sensory information? And how could you avoid the problem of bilocation if you somehow found a way to equally focus on both sensory inputs?

A smaller variation of this idea exists in the form of the brain in a jar. If your brain was in a jar that never left your house and was only connected to your body via quantum nanomemes but your body would otherwise go about its/your day as normal, would you say you never left your house? Now add one more body and think.

>If I am completely plugged in to the sensory information received from somewhere else, and if the information received through my Material body was somehow overridden for the most part, what would make you say I am not somewhere else as long as you claim Consciousness is generated in the Material brain as a secondary process to the input of sensory information?

Whether your senses are accurate or whether you are a brain in a jar makes no difference, your consciousness is in your brain, no matter where you "think" you are.

>as you claim Consciousness is generated in the Material brain as a secondary process to the input of sensory information?

I don't claim that, don't try to put words in my mouth. Your brain would produce "experiences" even if you had no senses at al, as for example when you "see" things in your dreams despite being in a dark room with your eyes closed.

>would you say you never left your house?

No because "I" am more than my consciousness, "I" am also my body. I /would/ say that my consciousness never leaves the house, tho.

Has there ever been a Scientific method, or any method, and a body of data that was ever collected without Conscious agents? They're not the same thing, yes. Like I said, the former is the zinger and the latter is the dictionary.

Also:

>scientists are known for constantly sabotaging each other, rejecting theories based on their feelings, and fudging their own data all the time
>pointing out this objective fact is SOLIPSISM

>muh solipsism

Prove tome that you exist or fuck off and irritate someone else.

Do you realize you sound like a proper Schizophernic right now?

Do you realise that you don't know what that word means? Also, this is YOUR examples I'm replying to so if it sounds crazy then you're the one with the mental health issues.

I would have to exist, otherwise that feeling in your throat was caused by your own Subjective phantasms, which is a classic syndrome of Schizophrenia.

An entity is conscious if it is subject to an experience. Consciousness is the reception of subjective experience.

Maybe I'm dreaming? Maybe I do't exist either and it's just random patterns? I guess we can never know :^)

>you don't know what that word means?

I do. Do you?

My questions make perfect sense, they are also perfectly innocuous. Cognitive sluggishness as well as irritation at otherwise benign stimuli is definite proof of Schizophrenia.

That's nice idiot.

Poverty of speech and withdrawal into one's self. Textbook.

That's nice idiot.

science is a social institution but still produces useful theories and findings that can describe things we didnt understand before and make predictions to our benefit. to debase it on the basis of method or the limits of our own subjectivity is naive.

wait what are you trying to prove through this idea though. you saying can you be in two places at the same time?

i think the fact that you have a head in one place and a body somewhere else technically doesnt have anything to do with the sense of self in the brain necessarily. its still one self.

hey Veeky Forums how about modelling consciousness scientifically by stating it's a form of hysteresis.

that is, it's the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it, as for instance when magnetic induction lags behind the magnetizing force.

calm down kids

An ability to comprehend the observable universe in a way which both self recognises and is able to imagine/comprehend fictional instances.

or like, I guess.

that's way too ambiguous. what does it mean to imagine/comprehend fictional instances? i could argue that a machine that has no concioussness can simulate fictional instances.

>definition of consciousness
Some bullshit some hippy-dippy children made up to make themselves feel important and all fuzzy inside.

what would you say? i think self-recognition is pretty much the only needed definition (in a very vague way)

I don't think self-recognition is needed at all

ofcourse it is, what else would it be

>subjective experience
What decides subjectivity? Although brainless would a plant be considered to be conscious. Or possibly an amoeba?

i dont think so. i guess on the continuum technically. i think consciousness is mediated by the ability to process external and internal sensory input. but i think consciousness only comes about when youre able to infer a unified of self and i dont think those things would have a sense of self.

Without sounding soft, could we go off emotion?

The feeling of being "awake".

When you wake up in the morning, the sudden rush of senses. The sight of the light from your window, the sound of your alarm, smell of old laundry, feeling of the pillows. Vomit from last night.

You know when you're awake, you know when you're conscious. Anything, or anyone, which can tell it's awake and conscious naturally and through emotion, rather than a predestined programming or initiative to tell you it's awake.

maybe thats the best way to describe it.

OP
Let me suggest something new.

A lot of shit's been said about reacting to a stimuli in order to produce a response proving that the self cannot be absent. With this being said, plants technically have a form of consciousness.
There are numerous animals that will sacrifice themselves for the good of the pack, school, group, flock, etc. Thus shows that recognizing oneself cannot be the only requirement to consciousness either.

>What if I asked you all these questions?
Does a flowering plant experience consciousness as it follows the sun's path through the sky?
Is it possible that all life has a consciousness?
What is the lowest form of life in which we can see stimuli causing reactions of self preservation.

My definition seems to work with the answers I came up with.

>Consciousness is not just the recognition of self. This recognition, in its most rudimentary form, reveals itself as self preservation for the purpose of reproduction. In its most complex form, consciousness reveals itself in formal hypothetical and abstract thought in order to continue societal patterns which are sustaining the majority of the population. All forms of life fall on the spectrum between those two extremes.

>TLDR: knowing yourself + preserving yourself for the advancement of life = consciousness.

Challenge me. Name one organism that does not fit in that definition or fall on my spectrum. I also don't want some bullshit retardation thread about depression and self harm. Be intelligent, fags.

I would even go a step further and say that consciousness is universal. Every system has some degree of consciousness. Not just living system. Even a photon has some degree of consciousness, a very very small degree. The higher and more complex the amount of information integrated into our reality the higher the degree of consciousness.

i think recognising yourself in a mirror is different to having a self.

i think the self is just an inference from internal(+external) sensory data but that can only happen at the highest levels of abstraction. so i think a plant cant have that.

i think self-preservation is kind of a necessity of having a self. Infact, i think the self evolved because of that.

but i dont think self-preservation is the important part though it colours alot of if not all of our experiences e.g. emotion, eating.

a photon having consciousness? that makes no sense outside of dualism

If you believe in determinism than consciousness is just an observer .
Consciousness could also be the amalgamation of interconnected inputs and outputs . Either ways irs arrogant to assume you know the answer because the question delves into the metaphysical and the technology to answer the question does not exist .

I think the better question is why is why is there a conscious .
Ocam's Razor
If there is to be a creature that can react to its environment why make it able to ''''observe ''''. Just make it react and it it will survive . In terms of evolution , self awareness seems to be a waste of energy . Organic robots would have made more sense .

whatever man, i think the scientifically operationalized definition isnt agreed on yet

however, in breakthrough ep 3 they show some neurologist demonstrating how if you turn off a certain part of the brain (the claustrum) the person just stops doing all higher cognitive functions and just stays there and breathes; when they turned the claustrum back on the person wasnt aware anything happened or that and that much time had passed, so there you go the biological location of consciusness

it makes sense to have a sense of self. we are unitary organisms traversing through complex uncertain environments so it makes sense that action is organized and co-ordinated at the level of the "self" or that organism. self boundaries are a necessity in order to make accurate, co-ordinated multisensory perceptions, motor trajectories and action sequences. a high sense of self is also a biproduct of a brain that can make powerful inferences and is very intelligent so it is also a necessity in that sense. "observation" is just a natural product of these processes and perhaps also the fact that the brain is inherently predictive of its sensory states because purely feedforward methods of inference are computationally intractable.

i can tell you the claustrum is definitely not where your sense of self comes from.

>your sense of self
That's the other kind of "consciousness". Seeing as people mean different things by it, there are probably distinct parts of the brain to deal with the different aspects.

Anything prokaryotic; bacteria

>>begrudgingly admit consciousness cannot be reduced to Material sensory input

That is not what you just argued. You gave a situation in which all the sensory inputs from Madagascar are transmitted to you, implying that material sensory input does determine at least part of your conscious state. Furthermore, if there were more sensory inputs, you'd integrate them into some alternative image, which may or may not make sense. It's human nature to make patterns. You'd feel as if you were in some odd superposition of the room and Madagascar, and probably wouldn't be able to separate the two.

>If you were only plugged into the sensory input from that room enough that you could evenly split your attention between it and the sensory input of your current Material body

This is dumb because of the aforementioned principle.

If you somehow isolated me from my environment and provided me with all the sensory data from a spot in Madagascar, it would certainly seem like I was in Madagascar - but I wouldn't claim that on LSD I am in a different universe. Also, I'd argue that this wouldn't be possible unless I was physically in Madagascar - it's impossible to completely isolate someone from their surroundings and produce accurate/abundant enough stimuli to depict a real-world location; you could emulate Madagascar but not replicate it. Another way would be to "somehow" engineer a dissociative drug that also perfectly produces the sensation of being somewhere a bit like Madagascar, but then it would be quite clear that it's the effects of the drug that convince me of my location.

Define what you mean by "define consciousness". Are you asking "what is consciousness", or are you asking "what do we mean when we say consciousness"? Because it's a very general word. If you want people to define what consciousness is, then you have to explain what kind of consciousness you want them to define.

I think it is impossible to define. I'm probably just a biological machine.

Yes I like this analogy. Most people are really crappy at realizing they are dreaming while they are dreaming. Me too.

>Waking up.
>Wait a pink elephant at my gym? I really should have suspected something wasn't real...

You are just butt mad that you can't steer someones emotions by giving them stimuli. You are the one with the issues here.

When you're dreaming, you can't always tell. But when you're awake, you always know.

That might be just because you haven't awoken from this state even once yet.

Now you sound as those crazy new agers with weird hair and questionable drug habits so I will probably just disregard your idea by association.

The body is hardware, the mind / consciousness is software.
There.

Material body is in one place and is receiving the stimuli in that same place via signals transmitted to the body from another location.
You are not in two locations at once, and you never will be. Next you'll be telling me phantom pains mean the arm is still there lmao

surprised this thread is still here

Only total fucktards, who want to perpetually run in circles, sit around and try to define consciousness.
>ITT complete dumbassery
Every. Fucking. One. Of. You.

Consciousness don't really idiot.

Awareness is a meme, free will is a meme, I think therefore I am is a big fat meme.

Memes are a meme.
They are also real things, so you haven't really created an argument, you have just made your vocabulary less coherent by stripping context from more meaningful words and reducing them all to some common vague attribute they all share.

who the fuck is keeping this shitty thread alive? Every week there's a goddamn fool who keeps begging for an answer to consciousness. Just fuck off there's no actual paper out there that have any definite answer so if you ask it here it ain't gonna get any beneficial answer.

Most of the shit here is philosophical with some vague neurology backing it.

Until we get a philosophy board there really isn't any more fitting place than Veeky Forums to discuss metaphysics. You can cry about it, or just fuck off and hide threads you aren't interested in like every other reasonable person would.

A philosophy board would be a bigger circle jerk than /pol/. It's nothing but logic working against itself to prove a point about itself

The concept of a meme is also a meme, so what you just said is unreal and can be disgarded.

I agree that there should be a /phil/ board but this board will have to do for the time being.

I think you should be able to come at this from any angle, just as long as it makes sense and people know what you mean when you use the vocabulary you use.

So here's what I think:

The hard problem (which is actually the easy problem) has the answer: Consciousness is the recognition of experience. It really is that simple. You could ask "well what determines whether the recognition has taken place?" or "what determined whether there is experience?" These are good questions but probably more relevant to the other problem. After all, whatever the answer is to these, there is no doubt that there is experience. Experience is KNOWN, and experience IS. That is what is meant by consciousness. Not as a matter of language processing or abstraction or whatever, but as a reality.

The other problem, the easy problem (which is actually the incredibly hard problem), is how does the content of experience and/or consciousness correlate with the physical structure of the brain? I don't know the answer to this one. A neurologist would have vastly more knowledge about this; even then, there isn't yet a complete picture. This is where questions like "Well are plants or rocks conscious?" come into play. The better we know the relationship between experience and the brain, the better we will be able to answer those types of questions.

>Experience is KNOWN, and experience IS. That is what is meant by consciousness. Not as a matter of language processing or abstraction or whatever, but as a reality.

You would be surprised by the number of people who would disagree with this. Even after being described the definition of experience in a number of ways, they lack that intuitive understanding of what we mean when we say it. One might ask, is it that they have gotten so used to experience being in the center of their lives, that they are unable to question it, or do they simply lack first person experience?

>The hard problem (which is actually the easy problem) has the answer: Consciousness is the recognition of experience.

How exacly does that correlate to the hard problem? The hard problem is about how there can be any experience at all, not neccesarily about how the brain acknowledges it, but that is an interesting question as well. If consciousness is fundamental and its existance is governed on the quantum level or below, it is kind of weird how the higher biological systems of the brain can even understand the nature of experience and the hard problem at all, when experience is not directly connected and integrated with it on the biochemical level.