[ExI] Bringing new life to dead matter

[Will Steinberg]

David,

I agree if your 'consciousness' is Edelman's secondary consciousness.
However, I think his primary consciousness is related to all methods of
information transfer (motion) between memory (matter whose physical makeup
allows you to determine its past states).
On May 28, 2012 2:25 PM, "david pizer" <pizerdavid at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Explaining consciousness in 3 minutes or less.
>
> Regarding the ongoing discussions in this magnificent chat room of what
> things are "living" entities and what things are not, which bleeds into
> discussions of what is consciousness - I think some opinions of what is the
> physical basis of consciousness must first be agreed on in order to proceed
> to any useful new thinking.   If two people agree on that then they they
> have a chance of agreeing on what entities are consciousness.  (We don't
> really care what is living, we want to know what is at least as conscious
> as we superior humans are - right).   Further, since we living and
> consciousness humans are merely formed from nonliving atoms etc. that opens
> the possibility that some other objects made of nonliving atoms etc are
> also living things like us and conscious things like us  - for
> instance take the Universe as maybe being conscious - as one person
> mentioned earlier in this chat room, and as  I feel confident that most
> contributors to this forum are open to speculation about.  (At this point
> we ALL agree that is is not the stuff that brains are made of that is
> special it is the arrangement of that stuff that makes the difference.
> Everything in the Universes it made of similar stuff - no two things are
> arranged exactly alike so duh what makes the things different??)
>
> Consciousness arises from the human brain's ability to make maps of
> things using neural pathways.
>
> It all started, as you know, from neural pathways being formed  that
> allowed memories to be formed and then hunks of various brain meat to be
> able to call up those maps and (in the early days of course) "read"
> the maps and  make decisions that aided survival, allowed good feelings,
> and avoided bad ones from happening.
>
> But these early decisions were not "felt" consciously as they are now.
> (The brain does not know things directly it can only feel things.  This way
> of indirectly knowing things evolved from the original 5 senses of feeling
> the exterior world to an ability of feeling the maps of things the brain
> had created inside itself).
>
> But in these early stages we still do not have the brain aware of the self
> or consciousness.  And many lessor animals that can think may not be
> consciousness of their acts of thinking.
>
> What happened is that the brain kept making maps of everything it was
> involved with and in one mutation of a brain, somewhere sometime ago, that
> brain made a map of itself making maps, and making maps of itself *"feeling
> itself feeling its maps".*  It was at that point when the brain mapped
> itself reading its  maps that the brain became aware of its self and
> consciousness in humans was born.
>
> Is there some reason why other things might not have gone through the same
> process?  Does the Universe think?  It has been around for a lot longer
> time than me and you.  It is made of the same stuff we are.  It has
> complicated arrangements of its stuff.    For happy speculation we can make
> comparisons of atoms to stars, neurons to galaxies, neuron pathways or
> clusters to galaxy clusters and so on and so forth with all the various
> chemical and electrical activity going on inside a brain and the Universesbut at different sizes.
>
> I speculate here but hesitate to insist on a conclusion.  Like all the
> other philosophers on this site we want to become great ones don't we??
> But why do we want that  because as my late good friend Robert Ettinger
> once said:  "Most great philosophers in history were wrong."
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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