[ExI] Bringing new life to dead matter

[Kelly Anderson]

On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 4:09 PM, Will Steinberg
<steinberg.will at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, I think consciousness needs redefinition somehow.

OK, if you want to redefine it, then I suppose my bedroom slippers are
conscious too. :-)

>I think the insane
> force of my conscious perception is not really related to my intelligence or
> the complexity of my thoughts but of a simpler, universal standard of how
> energy and information are transmuted and encoded between various systems.

And your evidence for this is...

> The human brain is more conscious only in that it contains many learned
> universal facts in it.  We acquire these by observing cause-and-effect
> scenarios--physical and chemical reactions.  We are more noticeably
> conscious because we have memories of these reactions.  I think your
> pancreas is as conscious as the information it needs to process.  In essence
> I am saying there is no seat of consciousness, only an emergent, holographic
> pattern, called the "self" that the brain develops to cope with the insane
> amount of data it receives, and that a pancreas has some confusing
> pancreatic form of perception and no overarching data management system, so
> it perceives selflessly as part of universal conscious force.

How do you "perceive" if you are a pancreas? I must admit that I find
your understanding of consciousness to be very foreign from mine.

> I think the self develops out of "oceanic consciousness" as a platform to
> understand language and culture.

So if a pancreas doesn't understand language and culture, then is it
conscious? I think that at a minimum consciousness would involve
communicating with similar creatures. Thus dogs and cats are
conscious. Ants might be conscious, but perhaps less so. It's probably
a continuum. But the earth doesn't "communicate" with any other
planets, does it?

-Kelly