Thought Club

[LMNO]

EDIT: This was written prior to the last three posts.

Oh, so "pointillist consciousness" was my poetic way of saying that I assume I exist in a universe where there are other sentient beings with consciousness, but that consciousness is limited to that being. 

By the way, I figured we'd be far enough along at this point to understand that just because I only have direct knowledge of my own consciousness, that doesn't imply a binary divide about the existence of other consciousnesses and a descent into solipsism.  Maybe Logic is still a thing.  I give a 95-97% probability that other consciousnesses exist, due to observing how the Universe appears to work.  The probability sometimes goes lower when I spend too much time on Twitter.

I assign a much lower probability to Cosmic Consciousness for precisely the same reason: observations about the Universe.  The evidence for it is weak, and it appears the universe would work in the same manner regardless of CC's existence, or lack thereof.

Anyway, I'm still looking for your "in-between" steps that lead from a single consciousness, to an assumption of other individual consciousnesses under specific circumstances, to the assumption that nominally otherwise unconscious things (e.g. rocks) have consciousness.




Honestly though, if you want to build your castle by begging the question of CC, that's fine with me.  I just feel like it wouldn't be describing the universe I live in.

[The Wizard Joseph]

[Thought Club began as a little joke on an obscure internet forum dedicated to Discordianism.
It was a tiny Discordian Society, one among a myriad such. Once the Rules of Thought Club had been established two of the Discordians began to think at each other rather recklessly. The first thoughts were brief and linear, but intense. Soon the Discordians began to Get Ideas, such dangerous ideas. Before the end of page two on the thread they were barely engaged within the Rules, but rather thinking at each other with an unwholesome abandon! Curt replies were met with lengthy screeds. Reason and poetry and absurd statements and half-assed mathematical assertions all became one thing undulating uncontrollably. The first Thought Club was a riot!! Soon Thought Club became the reason to look up novel words, to sharpen an argument quietly to yourself at work, to look up the thoughts of great Thinkers and attempt to understand well enough to rephrase them and avoid copyright violation. Thought Club became a thing unto itself, a hive mind without any central authority except a set of arbitrary Rules long forgotten by their author and the other Discordians. It was glorious! ]

[Cramulus]

I want to share a passage from In Search of the Miraculous.

Disclaimers:

-I'm sharing this not as TRUTH, but as a line of thinking that I've found very fertile and interesting
-Gurdjieff loves to phrase things as big impossible absolutes, which should be taken with a grain of salt
-I just want to recognize that in this thread, we've cycled between a few definitions of consciousness, but I don't want us to fall into the trap of going "wait I was talking about something else" - I think it's all germane!




"How do you define consciousness?"

"Consciousness is considered to be indefinable," I said, "and indeed, how can it be
defined if it is an inner quality? With the ordinary means at our disposal it is impossible to prove the presence of consciousness in another man. We know it only in ourselves."

"All this is rubbish," said G., "the usual scientific sophistry. It is time you got rid of it. Only one thing is true in what you have said: that you can know consciousness only in yourself. Observe that I say you can know, for you can know it only when you have it. And when you have not got it, you can know that you have not got it, not at that very moment, but afterwards. I mean that when it comes again you can see that it has been absent a long time, and you can find or remember the moment when it disappeared and when it reappeared. You can also define the moments when you are nearer to consciousness and further away from consciousness. But by observing in yourself the appearance and the disappearance of consciousness you will inevitably see one fact which you neither see nor acknowledge now, and that is that moments of consciousness are very short and are separated by long intervals of completely unconscious, mechanical working of the machine. You will then see that you can think, feel, act speak, work, without being conscious of it. And if you learn to see in yourselves the moments of consciousness and the long periods of mechanicalness, you will as infallibly see in other people when they are conscious of what they are doing and when they are not.

"Your principal inistake consists in thinking that you always have consciousness, and in general, either that consciousness is always present or that it is never present. In reality consciousness is a property which is continually changing. Now it is present, now it is not present. And there are different degrees and different levels of consciousness. Both consciousness and the different degrees of consciousness must be understood in oneself by sensation, by taste. No definitions can help you in this case and no definitions are possible so long as you do not understand what you have to define. And science and philosophy cannot define consciousness because they want to define it where it does not exist. It is necessary to distinguish consciousness from the possibility of consciousness. We have-only the possibility of consciousness and rare flashes of it. Therefore we cannot define what consciousness is."

[LMNO]

I was hoping Cram would take up the question of, "what do we mean when we say, 'consciousness'?"

[altered]

I feel like there are varying definitions of consciousness going on here. I distinguish between Consciousness, Sentience and Sapience, hierarchically.

Consciousness belongs to most animals. Plants and fungi MAY exhibit consciousness, not sure on that. Consciousness is awareness of the environment: running on a program all of the time no matter what is not consciousness. I'd say consciousness came about with free living multicellular organisms, as before they existed there was no need to have more than an "evasive maneuvers" program ever: no way to sense environment in an active way, no reason to have reaction speeds fast enough to necessitate an act of choosing between different outcomes, so forth.

Consciousness does not require the mirror test. Conscious beings don't necessarily have a distinction between self and other.

Sentience is mirror test material: a lot of mammals and birds and cephalopods. It's where the subject goes "oh, it's me." Sentience is awareness of self as separate from other. I'd say sentience is a requirement of species that adapt to multiple habitats, have large social (but NOT eusocial) gatherings, or use tools. I don't know when it came about, but I feel like pressure toward at least one of those three things is necessary for it to become adaptive.

Sentience is not intelligence. Some spiders pass the mirror test. Sentience is a very limited kind of "being aware of you not being everything else". Consciousness is required, but it is not the same.

Sapience is plains ape material. It might belong to the VERY BEST AND BRIGHTEST octopi, crows and dolphins as well, at a huge stretch. Sapience is ... whatever gives us humans what we think we have over other sentient animals. Hence sapience, by analogy with sapiens. We don't actually have a useful definition of it. It seems to be approximated by the Turing test, loosely.

Sapience is AT LEAST related to intelligence, but not the same thing.

All of these are binary states. You either are one or you are not. This is because they're arbitrary lines drawn on a continuum that we don't actually understand.

By the way, for Cram: a single genetic mutation gave birds feathers and beaks instead of scales and jaws, so one can absolutely say that featheriness is binary (one has feathers or does not, there is no curve from featherless to feathery). Why would consciousness be different, if we treat "being conscious" as an attribute rather than "consciousness" as a number? If we did treat it as a number would we even know how to interpret that number? This is why I choose the POV I do.

[Cramulus]

I was hoping Cram would take up the question of, "what do we mean when we say, 'consciousness'?"

its a personal struggle to say something useful, and not just dump my reactions and opinions like some street corner preacher on output mode

consequently, I've written and deleted three walls of text for this thread 

[altered]

I was hoping Cram would take up the question of, "what do we mean when we say, 'consciousness'?"

its a personal struggle to say something useful, and not just dump my reactions and opinions like some street corner preacher on output mode

consequently, I've written and deleted three walls of text for this thread 

God same!

What I've posted thus far here has been exclusively stuff I feel like /needed/ to be brought up, one way or the other. And I've caught myself writing uselessness and had to Ol Yeller it more than once.

[LMNO]

altered, I like your definitions.  I hadn't really thought about having a category for "Sapience".


But what is the category for "Arbitrary Use of the Oxford Comma"?

I feel like there are varying definitions of consciousness going on here. I distinguish between Consciousness, Sentience and Sapience, hierarchically.

[Doktor Howl]

I was hoping Cram would take up the question of, "what do we mean when we say, 'consciousness'?"

I have a simple answer:  The knowledge that you are going to die.

It can also be expressed as "the capacity to ask what consciousness is."

[Doktor Howl]

altered, I like your definitions.  I hadn't really thought about having a category for "Sapience".


But what is the category for "Arbitrary Use of the Oxford Comma"?

I feel like there are varying definitions of consciousness going on here. I distinguish between Consciousness, Sentience and Sapience, hierarchically.

[The Wizard Joseph]

 

[Cramulus]

I was hoping Cram would take up the question of, "what do we mean when we say, 'consciousness'?"

I have a simple answer:  The knowledge that you are going to die.

It can also be expressed as "the capacity to ask what consciousness is."

I like both of those


the knowledge that you're going to die has a special meaning in the Gurdjieff work -- in his batshit allegorical history of humanity, he says that in ancient times, humans had this special organ implanted in them by dumbass "middle mananger" angels. The organ was called the Kundabuffer, and it caused them to "see the world upside down". One of its purposes was to block them from being continually aware of their own deaths. This made them more useful to the big cosmic machine, discouraging them from succumbing to nihilism and rebelling against it. It also created things like vanity, egocentrism, greed, lack of self awareness, lack of empathy... Later, the organ would be removed from humans, but these behaviors had already "crystalized". They were present in culture now, and so kids learned them from culture. Now they're basically perpetual.

It suggests that if we were more in touch with our own mortality, maybe we wouldn't be such shits.

[altered]

I call it "being out of my ass on Benadryl and trazadone to sleep despite cat being a ball of mayhem". Also "not caring much about syntax on this forum, because I communicate effectively anyway".

That said, I'm refusing to fix it. It's historical now, and I am not a revisionist. I wouldn't have erased Boston's illegal biochem attack on Salazore from the books, unlike some people.

[LMNO]

IT WAS A DATABASE GLITCH.


Why does no one believe me when I say that?

[The Wizard Joseph]

 

Based on a "true"story.