A poll on Consciousness

[ronthepon]

I can not agree with you Ron. Conciousness is not awareness. Consciousness leads to awareness, obviously, look at how our brains evolved, and then just look at trees. They're conscious, but not aware.

Consciousness is natures way of collecting data.

Thinking, comes later.

Re-defining concsiousness.

 

I'm sure you know what the phrase 'losing consciousness' means. You do it every time you lay down in bed to do the simple thing called 'sleep'. Yeah, you lose awareness, but then why do we use the word lose 'consciousness'?

 

Don't tell me that we do the wrong thing when we say so.

 

Obviously, your idea is in the direction of the 'mysterion' (see CraigD's post). Unfortunately, this thing seems to go away, 'disappear' when I sleep, while it still stays for the trees. Supposing I said that the trees were always in a similar kind of 'sleep', will you be able to prove otherwise?

 

I say that trees are asleep. Can you prove otherwise? Probably not. Neither can I prove that they're not conscious.

 

What I can do is assert that they are by no means conscious in the same way as we are.

[rocket art]

One of the best part that I liked (and there were more equally exciting experiments) in the book "The Secret Life of Plants" (copyright 1973 by Peter Tompkins And Christopher Bird) was how a Japanese researcher prodded a cactus to communicate by attaching it with polygraph and enhanced it by transforming results into modulated sound. At first the plant didn't respond no matter how he tried. Then his green-thumbed wife got an instant response from the plant. The couple became so intimate with the plant they began teaching the cactus to count and add up to twenty, replying with translated modulated sound that one witness amusingly referred to as 'cactunese', while the wife spoke to it in Japanese.

[ronthepon]

:eek:.

 

Kind of hard to believe just by word. Hey, I do want a cactus which adds, but it is damn hard to believe that.

[rocket art]

From that book, another plant registered reactionary response at the very moment a researcher was making love to his girlfriend even when he was long distances away from the lab. Another also occured such response when the researcher nearly met an accident on the street, and yet the plant recorded its reaction on the polygraph at the exact moment it occured.

[ronthepon]

How do you suppose the plant did that?

 

If you begin using books like that as 'relaible' sources, then I really have nothing to argue about.

 

(It's printed! So it's gotta be true!)

[rocket art]

Although the well researched facts written on the book were amazing, it didn't really surprise me because I have actually experienced such things myself.

 

I guess what I've read from Hindu philosophy may as well describe it. Everything we see are with various fields. At the most basic level, inanimate objects have Etheric Field; the plant kingdom have both Etheric and Emotional Field; animals have Etheric, Emotional, and Mental field; Humans are more evolved having all the three Fields and also Spiritual Field.

[Michaelangelica]

I really don't undersand any of this

 

Susan Greenfield: Well I think a big assumption that we all make that�s wrong is that you�re either conscious or you�re not conscious.

All In The Mind - 10/3/2002: Feature Interview: Susan Greenfield Contemplates Consciousness (transcript now available)

 

a lot of people think this, they think that science has got to be objective. Now consciousness by its very nature is subjective, when we study consciousness we�re studying subjective experience. So some people think OK therefore science can�t study consciousness, consciousness has to be left to one side

. . .

Dave Chalmers: Why should there be anybody home in here at all, why shouldn�t there be nobody? And given there is somebody home in here why should it have this incredibly multifarious manifold of experiences, of seeing, of hearing a sound, of feeling music, of feeling sensations in your body, of entertaining images before your mind, of reflecting and pondering and thinking, there�s this massive internal movie that all of us have playing in our mind. It�s not just a movie with sound and audio, it�s a movie with, you know, a vast number of streams going on at once, simultaneously � why is this there?

. . .

Dave Chalmers: You know I think the Buddhist traditions and other contemplative traditions have a lot to offer, in the sense that these guys have been studying subjective experience for many years from the inside, they�ve been gathering what we might call the first person data about the mind. They have a rich source of data there and a rich source of, in a sense, certain kind of empirical evidence that they�ve discovered through careful field-work over the years.

 

Now on that basis they�ve come up with certain metaphysical theories, which we may or may not accept about the nature of the self and so on. But even if we don�t take on board their metaphysical theories about the self, the world, the universe, we ought to at least consider taking on board their methods. Some of the more interesting work in the field right now is interested in trying to take that kind of Buddhist method or other broad phenomenal logical methods for studying the mind, combine this with simultaneous study of the brain and see what kind of connections you can make between the two.

All In The Mind - 10/08/2003: David Chalmers on the Big Conundrum: Consciousness

[InfiniteNow]

Reminds me a bit of Clever Hans, the counting horse...

 

Clever Hans (in German, der Kluge Hans) was a horse that was claimed to have been able to perform arithmetic and other intellectual tasks.

 

After formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reaction of his human observers. Pfungst discovered this artifact in the research methodology, wherein the horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who had the faculties to solve each problem. The trainer was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues.

 

...

 

As Pfungst's final experiment makes clear, Clever Hans effects are quite as likely to occur in experiments with humans as in experiments with other animals. For this reason, care is often taken in fields such as perception, cognitive psychology, and social psychology to make experiments double-blind, meaning that neither the experimenter nor the subject knows what condition the subject is in, and thus what his or her responses are predicted to be. Another way in which Clever Hans effects are avoided is by replacing the experimenter with a computer, which can deliver standardized instructions and record responses without giving clues.

[wine]

Re-defining concsiousness.

 

I'm sure you know what the phrase 'losing consciousness' means. You do it every time you lay down in bed to do the simple thing called 'sleep'. Yeah, you lose awareness, but then why do we use the word lose 'consciousness'?

 

Don't tell me that we do the wrong thing when we say so.

 

Obviously, your idea is in the direction of the 'mysterion' (see CraigD's post). Unfortunately, this thing seems to go away, 'disappear' when I sleep, while it still stays for the trees. Supposing I said that the trees were always in a similar kind of 'sleep', will you be able to prove otherwise?

 

I say that trees are asleep. Can you prove otherwise? Probably not. Neither can I prove that they're not conscious.

 

What I can do is assert that they are by no means conscious in the same way as we are.

 

 

Bad analogy.

Some people can obtain consciousness when they dream. It's called Lucid Dreaming.

Most people can't, though, and they spend a third of their lives a slave to their own Input, mashed together, in the frontal lobe, tee!

 

Trees aren't asleep, nor awake.

 

Yet, they have a network of shared information, which COULD be called consciousness. We already have 20+ Definitions listed here. :eek:

[rocket art]

a lot of people think this, they think that science has got to be objective. Now consciousness by its very nature is subjective, when we study consciousness we�re studying subjective experience. So some people think OK therefore science can�t study consciousness, consciousness has to be left to one side. . .

 

Consciousness cannot be subjectively defined, but rather subjectively approached. It would require relative, more holistic perspective, and takes more than Science to deal with Consciousness. Humanity does other endeavors that address it, such as Philosophy and Art, but in the advent of this age, neither Science has to be left on one side, Consciousness must be holistically addressed.

 

For a long time the approach was to detach Science from the dangers of subjective motivations, which is good, and Science had kept its standard and reputation by doing every means in answering the "How", but it dared not answer the question "Why".

 

As effective as a tool Science had become, it may become an unwitting 'objective' tool, at the whims of very subtle, but highly subjective agendas. As it had become a fact that can be starkly seen in reality, the objective science had become an effective tool for the "dominion over Earth's resources," and with such detachment to the planet's plight, existing technology had instead resulted with pollution and rapid exploitation that ultimately endanger, not just the planet, but humanity itself.

 

Things must be viewed holistically, and Consciousness cannot be disregarded, because when we begin to view things that way, for our survival, it becomes clear that the statement starkly seen in reality may be aptly be stated as the "rape over Earth's resources."

[Michaelangelica]

Perhaps there is both a medical and philosophical concept of Consciousness?

 

Their subject was a 23-year-old woman who'd been left in a vegetative state after a car accident in 2005. At the time of the study, five months had elapsed since her accident, meaning that statistically, she had a 20 percent chance of some recovery. She showed no outward signs of awareness.

 

The results of the test were shocking, even "spectacular," according to a commentary accompanying their publication in the journal Science last fall. "When we cued her with the word ‘tennis,' her brain would activate in a way that is indistinguishable from a healthy person," says Owen. The same was true for the word "house." "We think the fMRI demonstrated unequivocally that she is aware," he says.

 

While the patient met all the clinical requirements for being in a vegetative state, her fMRI clearly showed a brain capable of relatively complex stimulus-processing.

Technology Review: Raising Consciousness

Article starts here:-

Technology Review: Raising Consciousness

Monday, January 08, 2007

Raising Consciousness

 

Some seemingly unconscious patients have startlingly complex brain activity. What does that mean about their potential for recovery?

And what can it tell us about the nature of consciousness?

PS

Interesting article/book review on consciousness and how plants can give insight into this concept/state.

Alto das Estrelas

Summary of Benny Shanon´s book on Ayahuasca

The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience

Oxford University Press (2002)

I have been studying the phenomenology of ordinary human consciousness for twenty-five years.

In 1991, by chance, I encountered Ayahuasca and felt that it deserved a serious cognitive-psychological investigation. It further dawned upon me that, by probing into the far reaches of the mind as they are manifested in the non-ordinary state induced by this brew, we, students of cognition, can significantly further our understanding of the workings of the human mind in general