Are there any books that talk about conciousness that aren't yogi supersticious shit or pseudoscientific blabber?

Being able to respond to stimuli => Being smart => being conscious?

Why not is also a pretty dumb statement. Why should it?

>Your teacher has no more idea what she's talking about than anyone else
Yeah, I'm fully aware of that. That's why I'm asking for different sources.

>Of course those animals are self-aware in all the same ways we are, just with less rich definitions to their experience and more predictable values and behaviors.
How can we tell though? Is everything alive conscious? Is consciousness inherent to anything that can interact with its medium? Is it inherent to anthing that responds to stimuli? Is it inherent to animals? Maybe there's a part of the brain that simulates consciousness? Where woud you draw the line? Or is everything conscious as long as it crosses a certain threshold of complexity?

I need the truth ffs

No. Consciousness is a spook.

>How can we tell though? Is everything alive conscious?
>Conscious

You're still using words that have no definition.

Everything with sensory equipment uses sensory equipment to organize it's interactive experience with it's environment.

Ignore every response in this thread and read some analytic philosophy of mind and phenomenology. Husserl and Frege are good starts

One plausible method of discerning whether or not we can speak coherently of animal "consciousness" is by way of the mirror test. Humans, other primates, elephants, dolphins, and magpies all demonstrate some level of self-awareness when confronted with their appearance in a mirror, so while behaviorism as a methodology is very successful, I find it lacking as a philosophy of psychology

My bad. You asked for sources and I didn't give any because the questions you're asking can only be speculated upon endlessly without empirical conclusion. There's no way around the fact that if you want a material foundation upon which to base an understanding of "consciousness" then you're going to have to take the neuroscientific route which is also still incomplete in it's definitions and comprehensiveness. There is no one-to-one mapping of thoughts to synapses, there are no material traces of memory in the brain, there is no empirical structure and dynamic of the psyche, and unsarcastically, there is no way around yogi superstitions or pseudoscientific babble

An animal failing to give a shit about it's reflection doesn't mean it isn't aware of itself.

Reddit taught me that you can just say 'consciousness is an emergent property of the brain' and it explains everything.

>there is no way around yogi superstitions or pseudoscientific babble

Ok, I'm gonna dedicate my life to studying this shit then.

Brb, publishing in 15-20 years.

...

>Ignore any and all information and use ambiguous and interchangeable terminology to defend your philosophical pretense from the safe zone of unfalsifiability

Literally the mantra of analytical anything.

How can you prove that an animal who exhibits no novel reaction to its reflection isn't aware that that is in fact somehow it's image?

There are plenty. David Chalmers has a fairly good one

There's a difference between cognition and consciousness. The animals that are known to pass the mirror test also demonstrate complex displays of emotion and awareness. Certain birds have been observed to ritualistically cover their dead in leaves, elephants display grief for their dead and altruism towards other species, dolphins engage in play and copulate for pleasure. There are plenty of good reasons to believe that certain animals possess a mind

Can anyone objectively prove a mind """"exists""""?

"From Bacteria to Bach and back" by Daniel Dennett

Yes. If this isn't obvious, then you have an incorrect model of mind.

I can hold an apple and another person can interact with the same apple; the same cannot be said about any mind. I want proof, damnit, not intellectual posturing.

Way ahead of you, I've successfully unlocked parts of my mind I never knew I had and and writing out shit and trying to collaborate with cognitive scientists in order to understand it.

>any mind
But there's only one mind and you're interacting with it right now.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat?

Sam Harris also writes a lot about consciousness without the superstition.

...

>one mind
Where does the ego come from?

ew
sam harris is awful
youre awful
bad
bad choice
booo

Descartes

...

Unironically this. Harris s a poser with barely any intellectual discipline.

Your teacher is a moron. He or she has no way of knowing for sure whether animals are conscious or not.

You already have and are Consciousness.

fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf

Get a Dean Radin or Rupert Sheldrake book.

...

>my teacher always talks about how animals don't have any conscious thought or approach to their behaviours, it's just mechanical responses to stimuli

What's the difference between a live animal and a dead animal? Consciousness, that's what.

>I want proof, damnit, not intellectual posturing.

You want to apply universal logic to subjective experience. Good luck with that.

If consciousness is emergent, everything is conscious to a point. Of course, this implies a consciousness stream and the ultimate consciousness as the source. Given that everything began from a single source...

Same arguments apply to energy, mass. Why not these factors?

In what way?

He is not being sincere. He skips the hard parts.
He is right in one hand
>There is objective morality
But wrong on another
>We can derive this from science

These are very basic things.

Yes, but you'd need to study Chinese nonstop for about 50 years in order to understand them.

>He is right in one hand
>>There is objective morality

Morality is a human construct. Prove me wrong.

Exactly. By the western standard of proof and objectivity the mind cannot be said to be real. We can only create theories.

>Morality is a human construct.
Wooooahhhh

>Chinese """""philosophy"""""
>Worth shit.

You should read Being No One by Metzinger

i would agree that he is a poser but waking up gives the reader an incredible insight into the phenomenon of consciousness

Read Kant.

This is fucking bullshit.
What does your teacher think, that we aren't just stimuli processing machines with mechanical responses?

The Ego Tunnel

The Origins of Consciousness unironically. The bicameral theory may be pseudoscientific, but its descriptions of consciousness are pretty good.

/thread

Morality is a set of laws or rules by which life is supposed to be lived successfully. ALL things in the universe operate by laws - muons, protons, fish, planets, quasars - every thing in the observable universe operates according to discrete, measurable laws and rules that are consistent.
So, how can human interaction be any different?

I remember reading The World Outside Your Head or something similarly titled and it was pretty good. It cut through all the bullshit, focusing on describing how we perceive and react to the world.

>What's the difference between a functioning robot and a malfunctioning robot? Consciousness, that's what.

Your claim is completely unfalsifiable, m8.

You're tryin' for irony, lad; but you're actually really fucking close to the truth, you just don't see it because of your personal bias.....you should do something about that.............

There are different levels of consciousness
If it has a brain it has a degree of "consciousness"
Ants, for example, display ethical behavior (carrying wounded ants and removing diseased ants from the colony) but they certainly don't have the cognitive capacity to understand society
So they may be making conscious "choices", but they're incredibly simple. Their complicated ethical behavior is, for all intents and purposes, an automatic response similar to human flinching

>an automatic response similar to human flinching
Not attacking yer post, it's a good post; but....
I love the pedestal upon which human consciousness is placed; everything else is just performing automatically, but not us, oh noes! OUR consciousness is deep, mysterious, and unfathomable, and makes us oh so speshul!
Human hypocrisy knows no bounds...

Blame it on the christians m8, most greek philosophers believed that humans were just another one of the many animal species, Aristotles even placed humans in his Scala Naturae, but monks removed the human from it and fucked everything up for centuries because of muh human soul.

I literally can not even comprehend how someone comes to a conclusion that human consciousness is somehow above it all.
We have consciousness but animals are just like robots because uhhhh they do everything automatically because uh they accept input and transform it into output in some predictable ways I guess.

input -> processing -> output
It's literally the same template in every creature.
Only our processing is more convoluted and consciousness is emergent from it. There's literally no reason whatsoever that it has to be only in our own processing.

Well I chose ants because their brains have as many neurons as our hands
Other animals are much closer to our level of consciousness.
It works the other way too, a lot of our life is negotiating things that we feel like we can't control

Uh? Functioning internal organs, replicating cells, typically some sort of blood flow or something resembling as much. Brain function? The difference between living and dead things isn't one thing, it's most things.

Now required reading for all you reductionists

>as many neurons as our hands
Am I missing something here?

Yes and actually our hands can react to stimulus before the signal can reach our brain, so in a sense our peripheral nervous system "thinks"

consciousness is just thoughts about thinking

Read godel Escher bach

You didn't think hard enuf.
You think well!
Good point - the secular powers decide the course of science......whoever's in charge at the time sets the tune..............

Several of the books by disgraced philosopher John Searle are about this, and he takes a pretty realistic line. You could also try Donald Davidson or the Chuchlands.

*Churchlands

>Way ahead of you, I've successfully unlocked parts of my mind I never knew I had
can't leave us hanging like that user

Anything Buddhist. I don't have time to explain but they are very no-nonsense about it. Anything in Buddhism that might appear to be supernatural is usually a metaphor and not a hidden one. Sometimes they're even jokes.

Rec me some good buddhist books dude.

Just the pleb version of Being No One

Tipitaka (Pali Canon) That's a lot of reading though.
accesstoinsight.org/
this is a good website for studying it

>I need the truth ffs
You came to the right place. Studying animal behaviour at university is not the correct place.

Here, at Veeky Forums - Literature, you'll learn the truth. Are you ready?

Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson. These two should be mandatory for Philosophy courses.

Dewey, himself a great philosopher, wrote: "No philosophical problem will ever exhibit just the same face and aspect that is presented before Professor Bergson."

So ashamed:

"...that it presented..."

Sorry Dewey :I

Emergence

Look, OP - we can't even prove that we have consciousness; there is no proof. So, if we can't prove it for humans, we can't prove it for anything else. Of course, we forget that first bit, conveniently; and then we judge everything else to be inferior to us, so we can use them as we please with no qualms.
So, do you want to fulfill your desires? Then nothing and no one is conscious, and you are free to do as you will because no one can prove differently. You are justified by your ability to impose your will on others.
Or, do you want to be objective and rational? Then everything is part of the continuum of consciousness and is deserving of the inherent respect that reflective consciousness demands.
It's a matter of personal choice and how that choice fits into your worldview.
You will find that the selfish and the greedy tend toward one notion, and the respectful and the reasonable tend toward the other.

>we can't have perfect information, therefore we can't know anything.

No, try reading: the point is that autists like yourself will continue to drag out debate ad nauseam BECAUSE we don't have perfect information. They use the imperfection of knowledge to quibble and troll. At the end of the day, you gotta grow up and make a reasonable choice. Or, y'know, an unreasonable choice, if that's the choice you prefer.
Are you with the reasonable people, or the quibblers?

Nick Land dude