At what level of biological complexity is consciousness gained?

It's definitely not binary.

its quite interesting, ants (and i assumeother insects) actually seem to have pretty much equivalents to all the major brain hubs that vertebrates like us have.

define awareness

>awareness
knowledge or perception of a situation or fact.

define knowledge

iep.utm.edu/knowledg/

I mean scientifically

I lose consciousness just by drinking a little bit, make of that what you will.

Maybe conciousness is just an illusion produced by remembering previous events.

define definition

would you say people who dislike expressionist art like the works of vincent van gogh because they aren't realistic are conscious?

There are people who can do abstract thinking just fine but have zero impulse control because their prefrontal cortex is under-connected to the rest of their brain.

consciousness doesn't exist... chemical reactions in your brain control all of your "consciousness".

Many species of animals recognise them selves in a mirror. They are conscious by your definition.

just because its chemical reactions doesnt mean it doesnt exist?

most animals have homologous brain areas to ours including insects as i said above. whos to say they are not conscious to some extent. In a sense, i think consciousness can be linked to your ability to map your environment simply. I think the quality of consciousness humans have is probably linked to our ability to make much deeper inferences over larger contexts and timespans. I think consciousness is almost the combinatorial quality of taking information about your environment youve accumulated over time and flexibly using it to make predictions in the current and future context. our quality of consciousness is how we can associatively link information over time. integrated through attention, through the higher agranular and dysgranular parts of our neocortex

>most animals have homologous brain areas to ours including insects as i said above
wrong
Only mammals and possibly some birds have the brain areas to give them a semblance of consciousness in the way we humans experience it.

keked at that

The images on your computer screen do not exist. The graphics card in your computer controls all of your pixels.
>what is supervenience

just read Gödel Escher Bach and come back here for a discussion

define define

insects have equivalents of all the major types of brain area in vertebrates; midbrain, striatum, hippocapmus, sensorimotor areas, use same neurotransmitters as us, share same genes in these areas. it tells us atleast that though no way near as complicated, insect brains essentially do work in the same way as ours. ill try and find a good article

sci-hub.io/http://science.sciencemag.org/content/340/6129/157

pnas.org/content/112/43/E5854.full

sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214574516300098

pnas.org/content/113/18/4900.full

chemical reactions don't exist. it's all just electrons doing whatever the laws of physics say they must do.

see, I can do it too.

Consciousness only exists in the neocortex

This fucked me up

Let me tell you a story.
The first animals could barely feel the world around them, but, as the millions of years passed, it became an evolutionary tendency to concentrate all perception mechanisms - seeing, touching etc - in just one place. It was simpler and more effective, it saved energy and space. This was the primitive brain. Fast forward the clock and you start getting larger and larger brains. Makes sense since the better you can perceive your surroundings, the more likely you will react adequately. As the brain got larger and larger, it became more than just a centralized perception unit. It started doing things like math, organizing information, processing data, making decisions like a real computer. Now pay attention, because this is where the catch is. Brains like those of primates make simple statements, like "must eat" or "must have sex", and nothing else. When species like homo Erectus and homo Neanderthal spawned, more elaborate statements like "based on information, must eat" and "i must eat" started popping. The [math]real[/math] birth of consciousness - the birth of everything we know about human thinking, from language and fire to our deepest philosophical questions - was when our brains were large enough they could produce statements such as "based on the information that I have, this person who I am must eat", the golden words being "this person who I am". In very simple and short terms, it develops gradually and it, in the way we know, is gained when we realize we are inside a body.

i think its more complicated than that. consciousness isn't even very definable. i imagine that what we think of as consciousness changes gradually across species.

And in any case you could argue that birds dont have a layered neocortex but they have homologies and they are very smart. you could argue the same for ants; sensory areas, selective attention, hippocampal (Very important cortical area) and striatal analogues.

this is also interesting. its well studied that decorticalised animals often have alot of capability but again what is consciousness? if you define it purely on inferential abilities then maybe only humans have it but where do you draw the line. Even so, it still seems very clear that alot of animals brains work atleast superficially in a similar way to ours.
researchgate.net/profile/Javier_Lopez_Calderon/publication/247373369_The_mesencephalon_as_a_source_of_preattentive_consciousness/links/5786dff708ae3949cf556538.pdf

Consciousness is what the brain does.

If a human baby never is taught to talk and can not see, will it have a consciousness?
So then, why not a dog?
We see that a bitch with 5 puppies is aware of a lot of things. Can see reflex on herself? Can a human without the knowledge of language do that?

I remember reading a story about a girl who was deaf, mute and blind from birth, and only recently thanks to technology she was able to see and hear, and had to learn human language and stuff at an already advanced age (~30 yo). She talked about it felt like she wasn't really alive, she was kind of dead or asleep. It was creepy reading it.

>i imagine that what we think of as consciousness changes gradually across species
If that's the case then does consciousness actually exist in any real sense? are we really just talking about intelligence?

>And in any case you could argue that birds dont have a layered neocortex
Avians don't have a neocortex but some species have structures that look and function extremely similarly to the neocortex.

I would like to learn more about the study on her.

At all levels

Sauce me the fuck up.

consciousness is a spectrum unironicly

Well awareness does exist but obviously humans can make alot deeper inferences about the world and have a bigger repertoir of behaviour than other animals. All animals represent the world and they all seem to use brain parts that are equivalent to eachother across species in terms of general function but its a matter of how much.

For the bird thing you could argue the same thing about ants really. And studies show insects do share some aspects of our cognition in terms of memory and attention. Just a matter of the depth of what they represent. I mean id guess they have pain, get hungry. But dont imagine they have a sense of self. Maybe self is what people mean by consciousness ?

Either everything is conscious to some degree - even computers - or you are the only conscious thing in existence and everything you experience is a dream

> they all seem to use brain parts that are equivalent to each other
But that's not true as I've been trying to say.
The computational function of the neocortex is unique compared to the rest of the brain and only exists in mammals and select bird species.

I am a human person (I can tell this because I have a body that greatly resembles of other humans, differing only from the traits that not just be but humans in general are different from each other, such as height, facial hair, gender etc).

I also know for a fact that, as a human, I am capable of verbally asking questions like "is my consciousness the only thing that really exists?" and statements like "it's impossible to prove that anything exists at all, except my own consciousness".

And I can see other equally human beings doing the same thing, like you are doing right now.

This leads me to conclude that I am in fact not the only person with consciousness in all of the Universe. Saying otherwise would be contrary to the principles of tendencies. It would be the equivalent of, for example, throwing dice 500 times, getting a 1 in 95% of the throws and claiming it was all just a coincidence, the dice isn't really rigged.

I cannot experience and perceive the same things as you do, but that doesn't mean your existence is unreal.

In the future, this could become a thing of the past if we could connect brains of two or more people by some means, allowing two people or more people perceive what each other is seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, thinking, feeling etc.

You are not the only conscious person in the universe.

The universe is a product of one's consciousness.

Computational function? I dont think weve gone that far. We roughly know how the neocortex works but we know less about analogues in other animals. Im not sure you can say we know how it differs from other animal analogues. Its also not to say they cant do similar jobs like with birds. Because youre wrong, birds dont have neocortices. Human cortex also differs to other mammal neocortex. You could make another line there? I dont see a reason to separate it when consciousness is probably not going to be a product of any particular type of unique structure. I also sent papers up there. One arguing about the midbrain as well rather than he cortex. Again theres decorticalisation examples. And one of those papers up there even suggests cognitive functions in bees that are usually reserved for the prefrontal cortex.

As soon as you have a central nervous system so notochords basically.

Consciousness is a continuum, and can be achieved through linking advanced semantic language together with an embodied mind and lots of these language speaking embodied minds interacting and creating something that we call culture. Animals and babies are thus not conscious, simply 'aware', and have reactivity towards their environment, yet solely have to rely on environmental cues to exhibit intelligent like behavior, but do not do this because they posses introspection or a 'mind-space' to reason in or with in a metaphorical relationship with the outside world.

It's emergence has thus been a gradual development, but only arose in humans due to sophisticated culture (especially written as opposed to oral transmission of information). However, once acquired, it can still be turned on or off, by lesions, narcotics or simply altered through modes of meditation, hypnosis and psychoactive substances, or due to brain disorders such as schizophrenia or epilepsy.

Thus, we need a sufficiently complex information processing machine that interacts with itself and its environment based on semantic laden syntactical hierarchical nested language structures, which are then able to bind real world stuff to metaphorical descriptions of reality within the 'self' and analog 'I'.

tl;dr Bicameral mind thesis

Great article about it: waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html

Its giant though, and I mean, GIANT

Individuals dont exist without a central nervous system.

All invertebrates are clusters of cells that work together to stay alive. There is no "you" in an invertebrate thats why it doesnt how you injure them because they are cells not indivuduals. A human embryo is also just like this as well

some great articles from a mathematical perspective written by some neuroscience giants.

aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-not-a-thing-but-a-process-of-inference

fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Elements_of_thought.pdf

i dont see how consciousness is dependent on culture nor language.

Dear Veeky Forums, scientists make the most naive mistakes. Please stop.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San-nakji

Consciosuness is not dependent on life forms, Matter.

Consciousness cannot be reduced to physical explanations.

t. Descartes

Not him, but for awareness of your existence, which is fairly key to consciousness, knowing that you are an individual is required, and it seems you can only really know that with language. Or at least we can't tell if someone/something knows that unless they have language

define define

define define.

Only a symbolic memory capable of a self-referential experience is necessary
So somewhere around neurons
Maybe even vascular/ mycelial networks In plants and fungi

>2017
>Cartesian dogma that is a denial of reality and can only be rationalized by assuming supernatural intervention.
Decartes was by far the worst thing to ever happen to the philosophy o' mind

About the complexity of a mitochondrion.

Your mitochondria, nuclei, red blood cells etc. actually think about what they're doing. Oftentimes they'll communicate via a rhythmic flapping of their plasma membranes, in many respects having a conversation! The action of DNA, cell membranes, and RNA is purely instinctual, but ribosomes actually concentrate on translating the mRNA correctly!

That's biosemiosis, not consciousness.
A mind requires a self-referential experience in order to be a conciousess mind, so it requires a perceptual memory, not just simple indexical sign relations

Actually, the fact is that we have been able to translate these rhythmic cell membrane flaps, and have actually picked up what is referred to in the literature as "gossip of the superstructure". Much of it revolves around speculation about what is to be found outside of the cell membrane, or about the struggles of working in such a cramped, and frankly quite dull, environment.

Cutting edge stuff.

religious answer: god made humans special with special "spirits" that allow us to be immortal and aware of ourselves

actual answer: a complex system of cellular networks that evolved over billions of years to process external and internal information, control internal and motor functions to facilitate survival and successful reproduction.

idiots don't understand the real answer and so will cling stupidly to the religious answer because its more comfortable for them to think that they understand the way things are than to do the work to learn about the way things really are.

It's not clinging to a belief if I find the arguments in favour of God's existence far more convincing than those to the contrary, pal.

That still doesn't answer OP.

>tfw to smart too answer the question

You are the idiot if you don't find the religious answer infinitely more comforting than the actual answer. Kill yourself.

>you're an idiot if you don't find the idea of magic father in the sky comforting
are you 2 years old

Perhaps you should actually educate yourself on the arguments for religion before showing your ignorance so plainly on here.

>educate yourself on religion
>ON RELIGION
are you 1 year old

>Perhaps you should actually educate yourself on the arguments for religion before showing your ignorance so plainly on here

oh no, guys, we have a facebook religious echo chamber escapee on here who actually thinks he doesn't sound like a retard to everyone who actually knows things.

He is of course trolling.

But your description of religious idea is incomplete, the magic father is also a mass murderer of innocent children, kills kids if they laugh at a bald crazy man (=prophet) can't do simple things even though he is all powerful and don't know shit even when he is all knowing. He is also immature, sadistic and a whining piece of shit. Source: the bible.

>muh god is evil!
you can fuck off too, no one gives a fuck about your opinions on religion here

>discussing religion on /sci

will you retards never learn

back to /pol with your intellectually weak gibberish

You are a fucking blithering idiot. You don't find it uncomforting that you will die? And for there to not be an afterlife? Fucking kill yourself. I really hope you die. I really do. No kidding.

Stop shitposting.

>I can't read
typical of "muh /pol/ boogeyman" idiots. you, too, can fuck off

>IM SCARED OF DYING WTF
>religion means I'm comforted and love everyone
>but I really hope you die
lol go back to your faggot facebook cult

>typical of "muh /pol/ boogeyman" idiots. you, too, can fuck off

its the freaking rules familam. take your religious shit back to /pol where its welcome

You are the most unpleasent human being I've come across. I really want you to die. I really hope so. And I'm never said I was relgious you fucking retard. Kill yoursefl.

I'm going to be direct with you because you don't seem very bright. You responded to a post telling people to keep their religious shit out of here saying exactly the same thing.

shan't be reading through this shitty thread

someone's triggered

What makes you think that conciousness is created? What if you considered that consciousness is prior to everything else and there is no such thing as physical world aka stuff behind the scenes. I mean modern science can't even prove that consciousness exist even though that the only thing that exist (for you most sertanly) is consciousness.

It doesn't bother me at all that you pretend to dervive pleasure from my reaction to realizing how detestable a person you are. I would genuinely be much happier if you committed suicide.

Actually, you're talking to someone who has bothered to understand the immense complexity of the arguments surrounding the existence of God.

You're just a typical lazy new-atheist.

Before you deny there is any good reason to believe in something you really ought to learn about the arguments properly.

>I would genuinely be much happier if you committed suicide
whoops what a good person, you're definitely going to heaven then ;^)

>Actually, you're talking to someone who has bothered to understand the immense complexity of the arguments surrounding the existence of God.

That has never been proven.

Intellectual (me):1
Pseudo-intellectual:0

I am an atheist as well.
I'm just an educated atheist.
Here are my beliefs:
Empiricism, falsifiability, fallacy checking, the scientific method, the socratic method, humility, scientific consensus, etc.

I don't believe in jumping to conclusions or siding with an unproven concept and calling it proven with emotional fervor.
That's irrational.
The only rational thing is to remain neutral until something is proven true with experimentation or some form of evidence.
Presumption is never evidence.

>the immense complexity of the arguments surrounding the existence of God.

that's a joke right?

there is no evidence any god exists or ever existed

that's all there is to know about the subject.

Why don't you point to a post where I ever said I was a religious man? Please, point to a post. Go ahead and green text it. You fucking braindead reddit-spacing cocksucker. And then put a bullet in your brain.

You are out of the game, that's what you wanted.
I'll spend some of my energy to tell you a few things.
First, you are one adorable monkey to my eyes, a really stupid one, since what you just said is wrong, since you can talk about math using words, one plus one is two, and you can understand nature without understanding math, you drop an apple, it falls and so on :)
a small tiny lecture to you, understand it.

And since you are not in, you don't want to know how to.. for example know how to calculate how to get your dream job? Like I have.. or.. How to be the perfect father?
Those are all states of everything in existence, plausible ones.

And yes, I am aware this is waste of time, like trying to teach algebra to a dog, but to others here who don't get this, be humble, don't attack me, but the theories, we will never be finished, but we can use these for literally anything..

be smart, for once in your life at least.

this post is so bad it just made me quit Veeky Forums. bye

>Why don't you point to a post where I ever said I was a religious man?

>181 unrelated words
Someone's dodging a question.

I have to assume you're too ignorant to continue this conversation in an educational manner. Would you rather I just call you stupid instead of ignorant? Because you're acting pretty stupid right now. And mad.

You do realize that since you've been bated from your normal shit posts to actually taking the time to write shit out, it means that I've won the troll battle you started in the first place, right? Since you failed at your pathetic attempt to shit post like the troll you are I figured I'd give you a taste of your own medicine.

I'm glad you realize that you've been bested.

You've posted 550 words of bait. You've reeled in 291 words of bait responses, including this one. You are the failure, retard.

Any sensible person who has bothered to engage with the literature would recognise that the theist position can be held on logical grounds. The arguments are too complex to go into here, but I could recommend you some books.

>there is no evidence God exists

If something logically follows, based upon premises that do have supportive material evidence, then you must accept the conclusion. Essentially, arguments for God's existence are generally based upon pure logic, because one could suggest the actuality of the universe is in and of itself evidence. How they defend this viewpoint is based upon defending the initial assumptions, which are different in different schools of thought.

How do you know that the arguments are unconvincing if you haven't read the arguments in their proper context? It appears you're shying away from texts that disagree with you.

I used to be a "le rational materialist scientist" until I actually bothered to read apologist works, often very dense initially, and found myself drifting into agnosticism where I remain.

I could recommend you a reading list, but I'm sure you'd refuse it because you already have all the answers.

You are the most unpleasent human being I've come across. I really want you to die. I really hope so. And I'm never said I was relgious you fucking retard. Kill yoursefl.

It doesn't bother me at all that you pretend to dervive pleasure from my reaction to realizing how detestable a person you are. I would genuinely be much happier if you committed suicide. You fucking braindead reddit-spacing cocksucker. And then put a bullet in your brain.

Fucking kill yourself. I really hope you die. I really do. No kidding.

>anyone who thinks differently than me definitely doesn't know what I know!
you're the worst kind of idiot m8