I certainly don’t want the statement to be false, and I’m in no way arguing against it. I’m much more comfortable with Rand’s position than the idealist lunacy alternatives. However, I’m not clear on why it would be impossible for a consciousness to be aware only of itself. And I don’t want to just acdept her position out of desire to be comfortable. I want to accept it because it is unavoidably true. Could people please clarify?
On 12/24/2022 at 4:31 PM, Frank said:
That said, the point remains: how does Rand disprove the idea that consciousness can observe only itself? In the ultimate sense, not in this outrageous and easily disproven yogi scenario.
There is no proof and can there can never be a proof, because the concept of proof presupposes so much that there can only be circular arguments. Rand settled on identifying the fundamentals of her philosophy as axioms, themselves using a vocabulary of axiomatic concepts. One is satisfied with the axioms or one is not, but there is no arguing for them. They can be demonstrated, but no more. Opposing philosophies are the same way but not all of them identify their fundamentals as explicitly.
This is not a serious level of discussion, so I will not be replying to any further requests for clarification. Everything is ‘messy’ when it’s read in a certain manner.
“Not a serious level of discussion” sounds like “I don’t like that you aren’t agreeing or seeing that my points makes sense, you’re just not taking it seriously.” I even said that one point of mine might not even be relevant.
On 12/30/2022 at 12:10 AM, KyaryPamyu said:
which means: for Rand, the shift from lesser to sharper focus is ‘your fault’ simply because you feel that you’re the one producing that shift.
But I don’t think that Rand makes this argument.
That’s not a complaint about the discussion on idealism. It’s just a comment that I don’t think you’re characterizing her argument correctly.
You couldn’t scrub away everything underlying consciousness, even if you wanted to.
This is a very minor and very irrelevant point, but scrubbing away the underlying consciousness is the point of all the meditative exercises I’ve ever heard of before. I think that’s part of why it’s so incredibly difficult to truly “be zen”; even in the absence of any external stimuli whatsoever, the mind naturally wants to think about something.
I’m not sure if it’s actually possible to go totally mentally blank for more than a minute or so at a time. I never did, despite all my efforts in my teenage years, and although some people do claim to be able to do so it’s a claim which can’t be verified very easily. And even if a minute or so is possible, is an hour possible or is there some hard upper limit on how long the human mind can remain totally empty?
And does the meditator still have human rights while they remain mindless?
Anyway. It really isn’t relevant but it is interesting, and I wanted an excuse to throw my 2 cents in.
On 12/24/2022 at 11:41 AM, DavidOdden said:
Easy cases are that rocks have no consciousness, men do. Find where you would draw the line, saying for example that ‘a leech is conscious; a sponge is not’. I expect that you will puzzle over tardigrades.
Nope. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that no single-celled organism known to man is conscious, because all of their actions are the direct result of chemical reactions.
Nope. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that no single-celled organism known to man is conscious, because all of their actions are the direct result of chemical reactions.
I don’t know what you’re saying “nope” to – are you claiming that it is e.g. self-evident that tardigrades do are not conscious? I assume you know that they are not single-celled organisms. As for the question of single-celled organisms possibly having consciousness and especially the “because” part, what is your logic here? If you’re just reciting an observed correlation in what we know about extant life-forms on earth, I’m willing to stipulate that it’s probably true, but that doesn’t tell us anything about the nature of consciousness, it only tells us about the nature of consciousness in organisms that we are aware of. It’s list knowledge, and not knowledge of causal relations. Anyway, on what basis do you claim that single-cell organisms have no consciousness? We can take rocks and snakes as clear cases – can you say on what basis you would claim that a rock is not conscious but a snake is, especially if you cannot define the difference between “conscious” and “alive”.
Really, the only thing at issue here is the epistemological one about undefined terms.
I don’t know what you’re saying “nope” to – are you claiming that it is e.g. self-evident that tardigrades do are not conscious? I assume you know that they are not single-celled organisms.
Basically. I didn’t put any real thought into it (and for some reason I did think they were single-celled) but I mean - they’re tardigrades. It does seem rather self-evident that there really can’t be all that much going on up there.
I alluded to the fact that the actions of a single-celled organism are direct stimuli-responses to various chemicals. That’s one approach to determining something’s consciousness (the analysis of the mechanisms behind its actions) but on second thought it’s really not the best one, since we don’t yet understand the mechanical principles of our own kind of consciousness. It’s circumstantial evidence at best.
On 1/4/2023 at 10:11 AM, DavidOdden said:
Anyway, on what basis do you claim that single-cell organisms have no consciousness? We can take rocks and snakes as clear cases – can you say on what basis you would claim that a rock is not conscious but a snake is, especially if you cannot define the difference between “conscious” and “alive”.
Since we don’t have little windows into the internal lives of things like rocks and snakes, the best we can currently do (and possibly the best we could ever do) would be to abductively speculate on such inner lives, based on observable behavior. The more complex and long-range the observable behavior, the greater depth and complexity of mind we should infer as its cause.
Rocks, for instance, have no observable behavior unless acted on by an external force. You can put a rock in any conceivable environment or scenario and it will stay right there until or unless something else moves it. We can therefore safely assume that rocks have no inner lives whatsoever.
Single-celled organisms do have behavior, all of which can be adequately explained by the concentrations of various chemicals within themselves and in the surrounding environment. I suppose the case could be made for some strange sort of single-celled mind which concerns itself exclusively with such chemical gradients, but I still think it’s safe to assume that they simply don’t have any.
I don’t think that a focus on the mechanics of consciousness tells us much, if anything about what consciousness is. The mechanics will be fairly similar across all Earth animals for evolutionary reasons, indeed all life on Earth has certain structural similarities for evolutionary reasons, but we should not conclude that the accidental developments on Earth define what it means to be “alive”. So we should probably base our account on what things do, not how they are built.
The most basic fact of consciousness is that beings which have it can perceive the external world. “Perceive” is the verb of consciousness, that is, if you can perceive, you have consciousness. Unfortunately, an amoeba can respond to its environment, so why would we not say that it has consciousness? My fragmentary solution (FYI) is a hybrid of behavior and building blocks, focused on perception, which is more complicated that direct sensation-and-reaction. We have to specify what must be true for a being to perceive (but I don’t care what the physical structure of the being is). First, there has to be a system of input devices so that you can hear, see, smell, or feel heat or pressure etc – some kind of sensory nerves. Second, there must be a way to convert that input into some kind of uniform internal representation (you don’t have actual light or sound rumbling around in your body). Third, there must be a way to retain that information for a useful amount of time. Fourth, there must be a way to do certain computations on the current representation and on stored representations – does the thing look like food or a predator?
Assume a simple animal that has some sort of visual input system that detects blue light vs. red light – it eats blue things and runs from red things. It must be able to detect light, and process it according to some standard similar to human “red” vs “blue”, meaning that it not only can it sense a difference between “red” and “blue”, but it can retain that information long enough to shunt the information to some gadget that controls its actions – flight or bite.
I don’t think that a focus on the mechanics of consciousness tells us much, if anything about what consciousness is. The mechanics will be fairly similar across all Earth animals for evolutionary reasons, indeed all life on Earth has certain structural similarities for evolutionary reasons, but we should not conclude that the accidental developments on Earth define what it means to be “alive”. So we should probably base our account on what things do, not how they are built.
Yes, definitely. As I said it’s really only circumstantial evidence; it can be useful as additional information but by itself it cannot properly answer the question.
50 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:
My fragmentary solution (FYI) is a hybrid of behavior and building blocks, focused on perception, which is more complicated that direct sensation-and-reaction. We have to specify what must be true for a being to perceive (but I don’t care what the physical structure of the being is). First, there has to be a system of input devices so that you can hear, see, smell, or feel heat or pressure etc – some kind of sensory nerves. Second, there must be a way to convert that input into some kind of uniform internal representation (you don’t have actual light or sound rumbling around in your body). Third, there must be a way to retain that information for a useful amount of time. Fourth, there must be a way to do certain computations on the current representation and on stored representations – does the thing look like food or a predator?
Yes, that generally sounds about right, but how can we use it to determine what something’s consciousness is like?
My fragmentary solution (FYI) is a hybrid of behavior and building blocks, focused on perception, which is more complicated that direct sensation-and-reaction. We have to specify what must be true for a being to perceive (but I don’t care what the physical structure of the being is). First, there has to be a system of input devices so that you can hear, see, smell, or feel heat or pressure etc – some kind of sensory nerves. Second, there must be a way to convert that input into some kind of uniform internal representation (you don’t have actual light or sound rumbling around in your body). Third, there must be a way to retain that information for a useful amount of time. Fourth, there must be a way to do certain computations on the current representation and on stored representations – does the thing look like food or a predator?
Assume a simple animal that has some sort of visual input system that detects blue light vs. red light – it eats blue things and runs from red things. It must be able to detect light, and process it according to some standard similar to human “red” vs “blue”, meaning that it not only can it sense a difference between “red” and “blue”, but it can retain that information long enough to shunt the information to some gadget that controls its actions – flight or bite.
Using your formulation , consciousness would ‘apply’ to bacteria and other ‘simple’ forms of life. A single celled organism discriminates between ‘stuff’ outside of itself and what is inside itself and is organized and maintains the ‘stuff’ inside itself in such a way as to keep the distinction between itself as an entity and the ‘rest of reality’.
Stretching the analogy further, perhaps to the point of breaking lol , the primordial soup of ‘raw’ chemicals is a collection of rocks whereas bacterium are snakes that organize and utilize the properties of the chemicals in a specific way. Information about chemical processes that underlay the mechanics of protein manufacture and energy extraction incorporates the idea of perception in some form.
Yes, that generally sounds about right, but how can we use it to determine what something’s consciousness is like?
We use it (the above model) to clear up what kind of thing we are talking about. This distinguishes consciousness from what an amoeba does, and potentially answers the tardigrade question, as long as we can answer the scientific questions about what tardigrades can actually do (I don’t know tardigrades, I just sort of know about them). Amoebas respond immediately to light, and show no evidence of higher-level processing where for example they are repelled by certain wavelengths and attracted by others. The question of whether amoebas perceive is a scientific one, not a philosophical one, so the contribution of the model is only to identify which concept is under discussion.
Apart from sci-fi scenarios, I don’t think we can experience another being’s consciousness, so I can’t know if ‘your red’ feels the same as ‘my red’, but we can start to classify consciousnesses, according to what the beings can do with their consciousness. The above basic elements of consciousness don’t distinguish between a conceptual consciousness vs. what I guess I’d call a stochastic-sorting consciousness that has a handful of piles that it tosses perceptual inputs into (a handful of eat, sex, kill, use, avoid…). Instead, we need to focus on particular types of consciousness, ones that can do different types of things.
Further subdivisions of types of consciousness risk seriously transgressing the science / philosophy boundary, but it doesn’t take any special training or equipment to distinguish human-type consciousness from animal consciousness. We can easily point to logic, concept-formation and volition as faculties which distinguish men from snakes, and I am satisfied with unifying those three as aspects of the faculty of reason – unifying man’s essential nature, rather than disintegrating it into a laundry list of specifics. The first apt question then would be, how do we know that the nature of man’s consciousness is radically different from the nature of a snake’s consciousness? The simple answer is, have your snake neighbor sign up for OO and let him argue that his consciousness is the same in kind as mine. He might convince me, if he uses reason rather than emotion (which is the essential nature of snake consciousness). It is a scientific question, but it’s pretty low-key science.
Using your formulation , consciousness would ‘apply’ to bacteria and other ‘simple’ forms of life. A single celled organism discriminates between ‘stuff’ outside of itself and what is inside itself and is organized and maintains the ‘stuff’ inside itself in such a way as to keep the distinction between itself as an entity and the ‘rest of reality’.
Yes, and the delineation between a chemical reaction vs. free will is clear. But perception is a reaction, a subspecies of that concept. Now is perception “being conscious”?
The maintenance of the “stuff” inside, that you bring up is “life” isn’t it? And it is not consciously done in the case of a simple life form. But it is done and attributed to the entity. Hence the idea of volitional vs non-volitional consciousness. So it lives non-volitionally.
The delineation could have be done in the area of rights but it won’t work. Should a bacteria have rights. At what point does an organism require rights. One could say it does not have the proper consciousness for it to be appropriate. But then, is a child conscious. Or one could say, it is not conscious in the sense that it has free will etc. Or simply … it is not conscious.
But “the primacy of consciousness” is not about any of this. It’s simply that you can’t be conscious of “nothing”. You will always be aware of something. And if you are aware of something that is aware, it is aware of something.
Yes, and the delineation between a chemical reaction vs. free will is clear. But perception is a reaction, a subspecies of that concept. Now is perception “being conscious”?
The maintenance of the “stuff” inside, that you bring up is “life” isn’t it? And it is not consciously done in the case of a simple life form. But it is done and attributed to the entity. Hence the idea of volitional vs non-volitional consciousness. So it lives non-volitionally.
The delineation could have be done in the area of rights but it won’t work. Should a bacteria have rights. At what point does an organism require rights. One could say it does not have the proper consciousness for it to be appropriate. But then, is a child conscious. Or one could say, it is not conscious in the sense that it has free will etc. Or simply … it is not conscious.
But “the primacy of consciousness” is not about any of this. It’s simply that you can’t be conscious of “nothing”. You will always be aware of something. And if you are aware of something that is aware, it is aware of something.
My comment wasn’t in line with setting up or even exploring a delineation between types or kinds of consciousness. It was just an observation on DO’s formulation. And what I took as his view of ‘our’ understanding of consciousness as phenomenon.
I’ve seen lately a lot of discussion among astrobiologists and other extraterrestrial life searchers about how to ‘better’ define “life” in order to be able to better recognize what forms might be ‘out there’. And there seems to be a way to view those explorations of new or more comprehensive definitions , as converging on the ability to perceive and an example of perception being the ability , in some fashion, of recognizing and manipulating information , eg cells ‘knowing’ what chemicals ‘belong’ ‘in them’ and in what proportions.
In Randian terms “primacy of consciousness” is a non starter not because there is no ability to be aware of ‘nothing’.
The primacy of existence means there exists no such ‘thing’ as ‘nothing’ so the nonability perceive _it _isn’t a thing , there is no relationship in the universe with nonexistence.
To be conscious is to be conscious of something. That something must be something other than consciousness or else the content of consciousness is nothing to begin with. So to start the process of consciousness, something other than consciousness is made aware of.
In Randian terms “primacy of consciousness” is a non starter not because there is no ability to be aware of ‘nothing’.
I would agree, but this has to be said in a different way. After all, we do use the word “nothing”. We are talking about the concept “nothing”. So one could say you are aware of nothingness, although you are not perceptually aware of it. So awareness has nuances that have to be communicated.
