Definition of consciousness: 3rd Poll

[Subsymbolic]

Although with the additions of all those possible categories you've moved the definition from something one can materially defend - a position I demanded when I wrote the original - to a 'well, if this and this are thus it can be defended', it is still better than the second one.

I see no way of operationalizing sense if self. How does one find operations upon which to fix either a feeling or an perception of one which is really just a hand wave. Don't you see the other images in the mirrors? As far as constructing a self awareness I see an evolution of sense connectivity that can serve as a basis for such, maybe several such, impressions present in the waking and focused brain. For those not psychophysically trained one might look at the neuroscience of abnormalities like  Williams syndrome

Your proposal received only one vote, out of twelve... And, presumably, it was your own vote and no one else supported your definition.

And again, if we had to abide strictly by the strictures of good science, there's a load of shit we couldn't even have a decent conversation about. This is a place where people seek the warmth of other minds to comfort themselves against the biting cold of winter, not the staging operational centre for invading the world one way or the other.


I'll use this opportunity to congratulate all those still around for... still being around and having made it to the New Year in broadly one working piece. Let's enjoy that while we can in the New Deal of Trump's America.
EB

Hang on, are you actually framing an objection around how many votes he got? Congratulations, you just picked up a rare square on rational fallacy bingo: argumentum ad populum. Not one you see often...

 

[Subsymbolic]

And that you should think you don't need to explain yourself here explains why we're indeed done.

As such, when your account relies on you having enough sense of self to remember something happening to you but not enough sense of self to be a self that something happened to, then it's not an account that can be taken terribly seriously

I take the sense of self as just memorised autobiographical data, for example my name, people I know, who I am in society, what is my personality, what are the things I remember as having happened to me, etc. So, the sense of self as I think of it is something distinct from consciousness. It's essentially memorised data you may or may not remember.

So, I don't think of my sense of self as the something I would need to be conscious.

Or something I would have needed to have on the moment in order to remember the episode afterward.

And again, my attributing the episode to myself is something I did after the event, not during the episode.

So, in the experience I related, I remember having no sense of self in the sense just described. And, clearly, there's no problem in that.

Further, your failure to understand this fairly simple point shows there's no good reason trying to explain it further to you.

and so I was right in my surmise that I didn't recognise your garbled account of a putative mystical experience for serious philosophy. I'm sorry that I didn't make this explanation clear enough for you, but I hope this clears that up.

However, I'm starting to think this all has little to do with philosophy...

My "garbled account of a putative mystical experience"?!

Let's have a really good laugh here!

The reality is, there was nothing garbled, and nothing putative, and nothing mystical in my account. How about that?

How can you get that so entirely wrong? Who would need to talk to you, seriously?

Plus, the same extract shows you're starting to sound nastier by the minute.

So, we're done.
EB

If I sound nasty then it's just an echo. Motes and beams son, motes and beams.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Apparently, all those who voted for a definition in the second poll have now voted here.

Apart from fromderinside, who had to report his vote to someone else's definition, and me who had to report to "none of the above", someone else seems to have shifted his vote from the second to the first definition. Either that or voters are not all the same between to two polls, which would be surprising.

This is the winner, then...

Consciousness is, in its minimal form, awareness, perception, a
sensation, something that feels like something, unadorned basic
sentience. More sophisticated forms of consciousness may or
may not have additional properties, such as a sense of self,
memories, emotions, etc.

This definition seems to me better than the other one, not least because it makes the distinction between consciousness and sense of self (or self-awareness).

My criticism would be that it essentially replace the word "consciousness" with words such as "perception", "sensation", "sentience", which to me seem to relate to cognitive data, not to the nature of consciousness itself. For example, minimal consciousness does not include perception (of the environment or body) or sensation.

And including "awareness" doesn't increase our understanding of what consciousness is.

Still, not too bad.
EB

 

[DBT]

consciousness as we experience it does entail self awareness.

That's certainly true for consciousness as we experience most of the time but it's possible to be conscious without any self-awareness whatsoever.

That's at least my experience.
EB

True, however, self awareness is a feature of consciousness in humans and several other species, as far as we know. Self awareness comes and goes depending on what we are doing. Preening in the mirror, for example, requires self awareness, reading an interesting novel or some other engaging pastime does not.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

So, consciousness is the "ability to observe" is too simplistic?

consciousness as we experience it does entail self awareness.

That's certainly true for consciousness as we experience most of the time but it's possible to be conscious without any self-awareness whatsoever.

That's at least my experience.
EB

True, however, self awareness is a feature of consciousness in humans and several other species, as far as we know. Self awareness comes and goes depending on what we are doing. Preening in the mirror, for example, requires self awareness, reading an interesting novel or some other engaging pastime does not.

How can you read a novel without self-awareness? Who you are, who you know yourself to be, your own experiences, your own thoughts never come to mind when reading a novel? Heck, the mere act of "I'm going to read this novel" requires self-awareness.

 

[Subsymbolic]

So, consciousness is the "ability to observe" is too simplistic?

True, however, self awareness is a feature of consciousness in humans and several other species, as far as we know. Self awareness comes and goes depending on what we are doing. Preening in the mirror, for example, requires self awareness, reading an interesting novel or some other engaging pastime does not.

How can you read a novel without self-awareness? Who you are, who you know yourself to be, your own experiences, your own thoughts never come to mind when reading a novel? Heck, the mere act of "I'm going to read this novel" requires self-awareness.

I suspect that they are aiming at the idea of 'being in the zone' when you are fully engaged with the book - taking the phrase 'lose yourself in a book' perhaps more literally than I would.

 

[DBT]

So, consciousness is the "ability to observe" is too simplistic?

True, however, self awareness is a feature of consciousness in humans and several other species, as far as we know. Self awareness comes and goes depending on what we are doing. Preening in the mirror, for example, requires self awareness, reading an interesting novel or some other engaging pastime does not.

How can you read a novel without self-awareness? Who you are, who you know yourself to be, your own experiences, your own thoughts never come to mind when reading a novel? Heck, the mere act of "I'm going to read this novel" requires self-awareness.

During the time you are absorbed in a book, movie or interesting task, you are not aware of yourself or your troubles.

 

[Subsymbolic]

So, consciousness is the "ability to observe" is too simplistic?

True, however, self awareness is a feature of consciousness in humans and several other species, as far as we know. Self awareness comes and goes depending on what we are doing. Preening in the mirror, for example, requires self awareness, reading an interesting novel or some other engaging pastime does not.

How can you read a novel without self-awareness? Who you are, who you know yourself to be, your own experiences, your own thoughts never come to mind when reading a novel? Heck, the mere act of "I'm going to read this novel" requires self-awareness.

During the time you are absorbed in a book, movie or interesting task, you are not aware of yourself or your troubles.

There's definitely two or more incompatible definitions of self aware going on here...

 

[Speakpigeon]

So, consciousness is the "ability to observe" is too simplistic?

True, however, self awareness is a feature of consciousness in humans and several other species, as far as we know. Self awareness comes and goes depending on what we are doing. Preening in the mirror, for example, requires self awareness, reading an interesting novel or some other engaging pastime does not.

How can you read a novel without self-awareness? Who you are, who you know yourself to be, your own experiences, your own thoughts never come to mind when reading a novel? Heck, the mere act of "I'm going to read this novel" requires self-awareness.

I suspect that they are aiming at the idea of 'being in the zone' when you are fully engaged with the book - taking the phrase 'lose yourself in a book' perhaps more literally than I would.

They!?

Who do you mean by "they"?

I read the post in question and all I see is it's only one guy, DBT.
EB

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I suspect that they are aiming at the idea of 'being in the zone' when you are fully engaged with the book - taking the phrase 'lose yourself in a book' perhaps more literally than I would.

They!?

Who do you mean by "they"?

I read the post in question and all I see is it's only one guy, DBT.
EB

'They' has been under going a metamorphosis in the English language (like many words have over time) and has a dual meaning of a group of people or an individual with unassumed gender.

 

[DBT]

During the time you are absorbed in a book, movie or interesting task, you are not aware of yourself or your troubles.

There's definitely two or more incompatible definitions of self aware going on here...

The word 'Self' may be used in many ways. It may refer to the whole body/brain/mind as a general reference, a person being composed of all this, a living organism, functional brain and mind, etc.

I am specifically talking about our inner subjective experience of self, the body of information, name, friends, family, gender, past experiences, interests, hobbies etc, etc, as distinct from the body of information relating to the external world and its objects and events, self and not self.

The focus of attention is not constant. Not upon self in the form of self awareness, spatial - I am sitting at a computer typing - or any particular aspect of our past, problems, etc or every aspect of our immediate environment.

Conscious attention is not all encompassing.

When the focus of attention, ever shifting, is fixed upon a task, perhaps only for seconds, we are not thinking about ourselves, the mind is focused on the object of interest, a constant fluid shifting of focus and attention.


''Awareness is something apart from, and different from, all that of which we are aware: thoughts, emotions, images, sensations, desires and memory. Awareness is the ground in which the mind's contents manifest themselves; they appear in it and disappear once again.

I use the word 'awareness' to mean this ground of all experience. Any attempt to describe it ends in a description of what we are aware of. On this basis some argue that awareness per se doesn't exist.

But careful introspection reveals that the objects of awareness sensations, thoughts, memories, images and emotions are constantly changing and superseding each other. In contrast, awareness continues independent of any specific mental contents.

the observer the 'I' is prior to everything else; without it there is no experience of existence. If awareness did not exist in its own right there would be no 'I'. There would be 'me', my personhood, my social and emotional identity but no 'I', no transparent centre of being.'' Arthur J. Deikman, 1 Department of Psychiatry, University of California


Quote;
''The close relationship between attention and consciousness has led many scholars to conflate these processes. This article summarizes psychophysical evidence, arguing that top-down attention and consciousness are distinct phenomena that need not occur together and that can be manipulated using distinct paradigms. Subjects can become conscious of an isolated object or the gist of a scene despite the near absence of top-down attention; conversely, subjects can attend to perceptually invisible objects. Furthermore, top-down attention and consciousness can have opposing effects. Such dissociations are easier to understand when the different functions of these two processes are considered. Untangling their tight relationship is necessary for the scientific elucidation of consciousness and its material substrate.''

 

[Speakpigeon]

'They' has been under going a metamorphosis in the English language (like many words have over time) and has a dual meaning of a group of people or an individual with unassumed gender.

Thanks for the explanation.

I was already aware of this, in fact. I even use it this way on occasions myself.

Still, I don't think it's the correct explanation in this instance.

It's up to Subsymbolic to decide what they want to say.

Thanks anyway.
EB