<p>David,</p>
<p>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).</p>
<div class="gmail_quote">On May 28, 2012 2:25 PM, "david pizer" <<a href="mailto:pizerdavid@yahoo.com">pizerdavid@yahoo.com</a>> wrote:<br type="attribution"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div><div style="font-size:12pt;font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif"><div><span><font size="4"><font size="5">Explaining</font> <font size="5">consciousness in 3 minutes or less.</font></font></span></div><div>
<span><font size="5"></font></span> </div><div><span><font size="5">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 <span><span>agree</span></span> 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 <span><span>objects</span></span> made of nonliving atoms etc are also living things like us and conscious things like us - for instance take the <span><span>Universe</span></span> 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 <font size="6">stuff</font> that brains are made of that is special it is the <font size="6">arrangement</font> of that stuff that makes the difference. Everything in the <span><span>Universes</span></span> it made of similar stuff - no two things are arranged exactly alike so duh what makes the things
different??)</font></span></div><div><span></span><font size="5"> </font></div><div><font size="5">C</font><span><font size="6">onsciousness arises from the human brain's ability to make maps of things using neural pathways.</font></span></div>
<div><span><font size="5"></font></span> </div><div><span><font size="5">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 <span><span>avoided</span></span> bad ones from happening.</font></span></div>
<div><span><font size="5"></font></span> </div><div><span><font size="5">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).</font></span></div><div><span><font size="5"></font></span> </div>
<div><span><font size="5">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.</font></span></div>
<div><span><font size="5"></font></span> </div><div><span><font size="5">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 <strong><u>"feeling itself feeling its maps".</u></strong> <font size="6">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.</font></font></span></div><div><span></span><font size="5"> </font></div><div><span><font size="5">Is there some reason why other things might not have gone through the same process? Does the <span><span>Universe</span></span> 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 <span><span>clusters</span></span> to <span><span>galaxy</span></span> <span><span>clusters</span></span> and so on and so forth with all the various chemical and electrical activity going on inside a brain and the <span><span>Universes</span></span> but at different sizes.</font></span></div>
<div><span></span><font size="5"> </font></div><div><font size="5">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??</font></div>
<div><font size="5">But why do we want that because as my late good friend Robert Ettinger once <var></var>said: "Most great philosophers in history were wrong."</font></div><div><font size="5"></font> </div><div>
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