Dear Alexander, thank you for your supportive words. Regarding the place for ethics in such a restructuring of thought about consciousness, I am in the process of writing a book Chapter on the subject. If you start from the premise that cellular cooperativity is the fundament of multicellularity, mediated by cell-cell communication, I think that ethics/morality is a contingency for that initiative. If there weren't such altruisim, multicellularity could not exist, if you get my drift. I think that seeing the origins of ethics/morality/altruism from this perspective helps to make the analysis more objective than to start after the fact with civilized society. In this vein, I remember a report on the news about a child falling into a Silver Back gorilla's cage, and everyone marveling that the animal protected the child. Or for that matter the Cardiologist at UCLA who initiated the Evolutionary Medicine Program, marveling at the commonalities between a monkey with a heart condition she ministered to at the LA Zoo and human cardiology.......so sad, but happy that she has used that experience to initiate the program merging evolution and medicine at my campus. Of course I'm the only one in the Program not espousing Darwinian evolution, but I have been able to make my point about cellular evolution nonetheless. I distinctly remember the philosopher Derek Parfit being profiled in the New Yorker on the subject of 'Being Good' several years ago. At one point he says that he cannot reconcile 'being good' with Darwin....right on!############################Dear JohnYou have convinced me that it makes sense moving from "self-consciousness" to "awareness" as the defining principle for "consciousness" as such.Especially as "the self" is only a later add-on or by-product to "consciousness" as "awareness".This also makes the concept of "attention" very interesting as the word in its original French form means "awareness" multiplied with "credibility".And it is with "memory" that "consciousness" needs to develop a "a sense of self" as the foundation for its valuation or hierarchization slash credibility-attaching to the various fields, forces and objects surrounding it.We can even build an ethics of consciousness based on this assumption or shift. Well done, brother!Big loveAlexander############################Brent and TOKers, I am hypothesizing that consciousness is the net product of our physiology, which is vertically integrated from the unicellular state to what we think of as complex traits. In that vein, in the paper attached I proferred as an example the role of oxytocin in endothermy/homeothermy/warm-bloodedness. The pleiotropic effect of oxytocin on retinal cones and retinal epithelial cells would hypothetically account for seeing 'red' when looking at a strawberry, for example. It's the 'permutations and combinations' that form our physiology that cause such interrelationships due to our 'history', both short-term developmental and long-term phylogenetic. Hope that's helpful.########################################################Tim Henriques asked:
“What is your operational definition of consciousness?”
John Torday replied with his definition / model of consciousness.
Also, if you google for solutions to the “hard problem” of consciousness, you will find as many solutions as you care to take time to look into.
I’m sure all these models have some utility, when it comes to understanding various things about our consciousness, and our place in the world. But what I don’t understand is, why not a one of them include anything about the qualitative nature of consciousness? None of them give us anything that might enable us to bridge Joseph Levine’s “Explanatory Gap”. In other words, to me, they are all completely blind to physical qualities or qualia. In fact, as far as I know, all of “peer reviewed” scientific literature, to date, is obliviously qualia blind. Is not the qualitative nature of consciousness it’s most important attribute?
One important thing regarding conscious knowledge is the following necessary truth:
“If you know something, there must be something physical that is that knowledge.”
This implies there are two sets of physical qualities we must consider when trying to objectively perceive physical qualities:
1. The physical properties that are the target of our observation. These properties initiate the perception process, such as a strawberry reflecting red light.
2. The physical properties within the brain that are the final results of the perception process. These properties comprise our conscious knowledge of a red strawberry. We experience this directly, as redness.
If we seek to find what it is in our brain which has a redness quality, we must associate and identify the necessary and sufficient set of physics for a redness experience. For example, it is a hypothetical possibility that it is glutamate, reacting in synapses, that has the redness quality. If experimentalists could verify this, we would know that it is glutamate that has a redness quality. We would then finally know that it is glutamate we should interpret “red” as describing.
So, given all that, and given that consciousness is composed of a boat load of diverse qualia or physical qualities all computationally bound together, and if experimentalists can verify these predictions about the qualitative nature of various physical things. Would that not imply the following definitions?
“Intentionality, free will, intersubjectivity, self-awareness, desire, love, spirits… indeed consciousness itself, are all computational bound composite qualitative knowledge.”
As always, for more information, see the emerging expert consensus camp over at canonizer.com being called: “Representational Qualia Theory”.
To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1
To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1
To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1
To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1
To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1