Definitions of Consciousness: The Poll

[ruby sparks]

None of that explains one thing about what consciousness is.

It merely shows it is not one thing.

Maybe. Or maybe it is degrees of one thing. I think of it as that.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I already tried to get those using the term 'awareness' to explain what they mean by it, without much success I think.

What did you think of my revised, expanded definition in post 87?

Yes, I think it's preferable.

My opinion is that it would be better like this:

Consciousness is, in its minimal form, awareness, i.e. something that feels like something. This may or may not require sensations or unadorned basic sentience.

More sophisticated forms of consciousness may or may not have additional properties, such as perception, a sense of self, memories, emotions, etc.​

Just an opinion, obviously.
EB

 

[untermensche]

Human consciousness is a living thing.

It grows and changes.

It is not the same thing at 20 that it was at 10.

It is something that is slowly built through experience.

It needs experience to become something.

And the experience changes it from one thing to another.

So within a consciousness are all the little changes that experience has made.

Like a sculpture in marble is the result of all the little changes to the rock.

To talk about consciousness without talking about it's ability and NEED to be shaped by experience is to not talk about it much.

To talk about it as if it is ever a fixed thing is to not understand it.

 

[Subsymbolic]

By and large, yes.

With the caveat, which I'm guessing you'll already have considered and accepted, that splitting into two types is an arbitrary distinction (think spectrums) but is useful for understanding and discussion.

That said, I am strongly of the opinion that intentionality is both more interesting and more challenging than consciousness. If you disagree, then get the centre of two toilet rolls, place an apple and an orange ,in front of you, hold the toilet rolls up to your eyes and arrange them so that you can only see the orange through one eye and the apple through the other. Look at them for, say, twenty seconds, then say the magic words: 'Orange, orange, orange. After a few more seconds, say 'Apple, apple apple'...

Now, what's the hard problem again?

I actually tried that just now. What's supposed to happen?

Intentionality may indeed be the more challenging. Given that I am rarely sure I remember exactly what intentionaility is, I won't comment.

Google 'binocular rivalry' and make sure you are getting that, then discover how much of perception is expectation. If it really doesn't work then probably a trip to an opticians, but given your profession I suspect you'd have noticed.

It's certainly a distinction, but I think it is far from arbitrary. It is the dividing line between conceptual and non-conceptual content, public and private states, type and token equivalence and, I'd argue, sapience and sentience too.

 

[ruby sparks]

Human consciousness is a living thing.

It grows and changes.

It is not the same thing at 20 that it was at 10.

It is something that is slowly built through experience.

It needs experience to become something.

And the experience changes it from one thing to another.

So within a consciousness are all the little changes that experience has made.

Like a sculpture in marble is the result of all the little changes to the rock.

To talk about consciousness without talking about it's ability and NEED to be shaped by experience is to not talk about it much.

To talk about it as if it is ever a fixed thing is to not understand it.

It's not a fixed thing. Not even during, for instance, a day, or perhaps even a minute, possibly not even a second in the life of any particular, individual conscious entity.

 

[ruby sparks]

It's certainly a distinction, but I think it is far from arbitrary.

Drat. I often misuse the word arbitrary. Now I can't even think of the word I DO mean. Approximation?

It is the dividing line between conceptual and non-conceptual content, public and private states, type and token equivalence and, I'd argue, sapience and sentience too.

Ok but....and not an arbitrary line......but...not really, actually, truly a line. Part of a spectrum. Ok so we can talk of yellow and green, but there's no actual line between them. And in flux.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Logic may be thought of as involved at very different levels. One is when the subject thinks of logical relations. Another one is the logic of our basic neuronal structures. I suppose you talking about the latter.

If so, I'm sorry to say I don't get your point. Surely, a physical description would exhaust whatever there is to say about the working brain, including by implication, and therefore anything about the logic of our neuronal structures. But maybe I don't get your point?

I suppose it would be up to the science not to miss any significant aspect of whatever the brain really does, at whatever level.

I don't think that physical descriptions do exhaust whatever there is to say about the working brain. As I said. I'm a property (not substance) dualist about anything that is in the latter half of my definition of consciousness. That means that I think that some things are irreducibly emergent from biology. not mystical or different, they still supervene upon the physical, but are not the same. Some aspects of maths, logic and intentionality are like this IMHO.

For now, here's a quick argument. Imagine you are being chased by Laplace's demon. If there is something you can do in maths or logic that the demon can't do or predict in physics then you can get escape. So here's the setup:
Imagine deciding that if a process leads to two of something you will turn left and if there's only one you'll turn right. Now google:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach–Tarski_paradox

by following the process described above you will achieve a result that Laplace's demon cannot.

That's just a quick trick to make the point. If you want my position on this, it's basically this:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anomalous-monism/

It's actually closer to Jaegwon Kim's position than The Donald, but my position has some novel features caused by the fact that I don't actually believe in beliefs. I think we can save that for another day as I'm working for the rest of the week.

 

[untermensche]

Human consciousness is a living thing.

It grows and changes.

It is not the same thing at 20 that it was at 10.

It is something that is slowly built through experience.

It needs experience to become something.

And the experience changes it from one thing to another.

So within a consciousness are all the little changes that experience has made.

Like a sculpture in marble is the result of all the little changes to the rock.

To talk about consciousness without talking about it's ability and NEED to be shaped by experience is to not talk about it much.

To talk about it as if it is ever a fixed thing is to not understand it.

It's not a fixed thing. Not even during, for instance, a day, or perhaps even a minute, possibly not even a second in the life of any particular, individual conscious entity.

But again it is like a complicated sculpture. Carved out here and there by experience. And robust over here and there due to practice of some activity.

If you could actually look at it no two would look alike.

 

[ruby sparks]

But again it is like a complicated sculpture. Carved out here and there by experience. And robust over here and there due to practice of some activity.

If you could actually look at it no two would look alike.

While I agree, I can also see why the commonalities are stressed by those investigating or thinking about it.

I might, at times, think that this has a tendency to go too far. So many books, articles and lectures on the topic do seem to use a prototype rational, alert, 'normal'-functioning stereotype, a 'rational human' when discussing it (and indeed other issues such as free will) that I think some of the detail and variety can get a bit lost by generalisation.

But that's just a reasonably small caveat. Something to be borne in mind. A bit like the possible anthropomorphism that might leave traces in discussions. Some investigations, by their nature, seem to almost require us to deal mainly in generalities in order to allow us to extract meaningful conclusions.

 

[untermensche]

But again it is like a complicated sculpture. Carved out here and there by experience. And robust over here and there due to practice of some activity.

If you could actually look at it no two would look alike.

While I agree, I can also see why the commonalities are stressed by those investigating or thinking about it.

I might, at times, think that this has a tendency to go too far. So many books, articles and lectures on the topic do seem to use a prototype rational, alert, 'normal'-functioning stereotype, a 'rational human' when discussing it (and indeed other issues such as free will) that I think some of the detail and variety can get a bit lost by generalisation.

But that's just a reasonably small caveat. Something to be borne in mind. A bit like the possible anthropomorphism that might leave traces in discussions. Some investigations, by their nature, seem to almost require us to deal mainly in generalities in order to allow us to extract meaningful conclusions.

To merely look at similarities is to abstract, not to define.

 

[Speakpigeon]

We can only communicate what happened in the biology once it has been conceptualised into language. We can't communicate the biology based experience, we can only 'gesture' towards it, with varying degrees of effectiveness.

I think we usually assume that we all have the same kind of subjective experience.

It also seems that a lot of what we experience is directly related to our beliefs about the material world. For example, we subjectively experience redness and we take it to be the red colour of something in the material word we're looking at. So we can in fact talk about redness simply by identifying it as the subjective counterpart of the colour of some red material thing. Similarly, we can talk about our subjective experience of pain, joy, memories etc.

What we cannot do, apparently, is prove that material things result in identical experiences in different people, for example that we all have identical rednesses. And if there was any difference, it seems we couldn't find the words to describe it.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Ok, so, maybe it's time to move on and try a second-round poll, keeping only the options with at least two votes.

Below are the remaining options for your consideration. Those who penned them can still modify them before I start the poll, if they're quick enough about it.

In particular, you're free to expand your definition as you see fit, within reason. It's up to you.


Please note I can also still include new definitions, coming in particular from those who selected "None of the above" in the poll.

However, I'll do that only if your submission is sufficiently different from the ones already listed below.
EB

Consciousness is an arousal state, awareness, motivated to treat self and environmental events. Arousal is the overall level of responsiveness to stimuli. (fromderinside)

Consciousness is the brain’s model of the world and self, made of sense awareness, memory, feelings of internal conditions, thoughts about external conditions, and the drive to act adaptatively. (DBT)

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. (ruby sparks)

Consciousness is subjective experience.
Subjective experience is knowledge by acquaintance of any mental activity, including sense of perception, feelings, sensations, ideas and thoughts, recalled memories, decisions, or willed realisations or actions etc. as well as partially conscious activity such as dreams, hallucinations etc.
It is the task of science to discover the physical process, if any, generating the subjective experience, in particular in terms, presumably, of neuronal processes. (Speakpigeon)

None of the above

Don’t know