Literally. It’s something that we all experience, but there is no scientific definition, measure, or framework to study it.
We assume it is a function of our brains, but we could be wrong. Are intelligent birds, apes, and dolphins conscious? What about lizards? Flatworms? Trees? Yeast?
If you want to go down that rabbit hole, search “what’s it like to be a bat?” or “the hard problem.”
If you’d like to go all the way down this rabbit hole there’s panpsychism, which posits that consciousness is a continuous scale with “zero” literally being down in the elementary particles. So even a single molecule is not quite zero on the scale, having an extremely minuscule degree of consciousness to it.
I actually kind of like this because it means we don’t have to try to put that zero point at some other arbitrary location.
We have no idea what consciousness is.
Literally. It’s something that we all experience, but there is no scientific definition, measure, or framework to study it.
We assume it is a function of our brains, but we could be wrong. Are intelligent birds, apes, and dolphins conscious? What about lizards? Flatworms? Trees? Yeast?
If you want to go down that rabbit hole, search “what’s it like to be a bat?” or “the hard problem.”
That’s true. Every living organism could be conscious on some level if you think about it.
If you’d like to go all the way down this rabbit hole there’s panpsychism, which posits that consciousness is a continuous scale with “zero” literally being down in the elementary particles. So even a single molecule is not quite zero on the scale, having an extremely minuscule degree of consciousness to it.
I actually kind of like this because it means we don’t have to try to put that zero point at some other arbitrary location.
@bookie @gedaliyah And rivers and crystals are alive, if you define “alive” broadly enough.
What, then, makes a given definition useful? True?
What does it mean to be conscious?