“....merely a lame appeal to a logical condition...”

What does it mean to be conscious, such that more of less of it makes sense? According to one speculative metaphysic, in humans, being conscious is the irreducible necessary condition for the generation of conceptions. That being given, if there is something more conscious than we, it follows that something merely has a greater capacity for generating conceptions, indicating the possibility that something of greater conscious can generate conceptions the lesser conscious cannot, irrespective of congruent experiences. Such being the case, we would never know whether there is something more capable of generating conceptions than we, because the only means to know it, is by the very capacity of which we have the lesser.

Hence, the appeal to a logical condition being “lame”. Not necessarily false but altogether worthless, because its ground is in the fact we already understand there are things seemingly less conscious than we, but that in itself gives us no warrant to quantify the more of something under the same conditions as we warrant the less of it.

The common rejoinder usually takes the form of, say, in the case of an otherwise similar rational entity but one whose sensory input for vision is in the infrared spectrum, will certainly be capable of generating conceptions humans cannot. But this has to do with quality of conscious generations, not the relative quantity of them, which is what the question asks. He is not necessarily more conscious than we, but merely in possession the conscious conceptual capabilities of a different kind. But even that is another lame appeal, insofar as a presupposition of conceptions is granted but not necessarily warranted.

Anyway.....thanks for the interesting question.

Thank you for your interesting answer. I have thought about this complicated issue myself.

There is an experiment with a cat wherein it is presented with a certain atypical (for the cat) sound that is within its range of hearing. Measurements of the cat's brain do not indicate that the cat has heard the sound. Subsequently, the sound is associated with an important event to the cat (feeding). Thereafter, measurements of the cat's brain also register the sound, even when separated from the food stimulus.

Has the cat not, in this case, become "more conscious"? Certainly more "aware," which is to me synonymous.

Paging @bert1, Dr. Bert1 to the green panpsychist thread please. Your assistance is needed.

I don't understand.

There is another user here, bert1, who knows a lot about panpsychism and can discuss it in a very articulate way. I’m pinging him to come join this conversation so maybe you can get some more productive discussion instead of just people denying your premises.

ooo, that's cool. By the way, my question wasn't about the validity of panpsychism, but some of the answers were concerned more with denying panpsychism rather than answer my question. Other answers though were super- cool. Thank you for helping!

But to be honest, I don't know if ''more consciouss'' even makes sense. — Eugen

I share your perception/intuition. I don't think it does make sense. To my mind, nothing is any more conscious than anything else. Consciousness does not come in degrees, just as, (arguably) existence does not come in degrees. For example, we don't say a car has more existence than a rock. They are very different things, but in terms of their existence, they are equal. One does not exist more than the other.

I think Jorndoe has correctly characterised the difference between a person and a super-intelligent alien species of greater cognitive complexity:

Something could be "conscious of more" than we are. — jorndoe

The difference between the conscious minds of different types of entities consists in what they are aware of, what computations they can perform, what things they can perceive, what specialisations their senses may have, how they can reason about their experience, the emotions they can feel, and so on. In terms of their being conscious, they are exactly the same; just as in terms of their existence alone, they are exactly the same. When one says something exists, one has said very little about it. Similarly, when one says something is conscious, one has only said one thing about it. It's really very uninformative about the nature of that thing. On the other hand, if you say something has the mind of a typical human, you have said a great deal about it in terms of what it can do and the kind of experiences it can have.

I have not made arguments here, I am appealing to intuitions about what we typically mean when (in philosophy) we assert that something is conscious.

I think they should be treated as part of a reductio ad absurdum. Hence, Panpsychism fails. — Banno

Let's set out the reductio:

1) Quarks are conscious (panpsychist thesis as target for reductio) (assumption)
2) If quarks are conscious then they can be knocked out, put to sleep (assumption)
3) NOT quarks can be knocked out, put to sleep (assumption)
4) NOT Quarks are conscious (MTT 2.3)
5) Quarks are conscious AND NOT quarks are conscious (& introduction 1,4)
6) NOT Quarks are conscious (RAA 1,5)

Is that right?

I'd just do the reductio on 2 rather than 1

EDIT: fixed spelling

share your perception/intuition. I don't think it does make sense. To my mind, nothing is any more conscious than anything else. Consciousness does not come in degrees, just as, (arguably) existence does not come in degrees. For example, we don't say a car has more existence than a rock. They are very different things, but in terms of their existence, they are equal. One does not exist more than the other. — bert1

Makes sense.

Let's set out the reductio:

1) Quarks are conscious (panpsychist thesis as target for reductio) (assumption)
2) If quarks are conscious then they can be knocked out, put to sleep (assumption)
3) NOT quarks can be knocked out, put to sleep (assumption)
4) NOT Quarks are conscious (MTT 2.3)
5) Quarks and conscious AND NOT quarks are conscious (& introduction 1,4)
6) NOT Quarks are conscious (RAA 1,5) — bert1

Too complicated for me :))

Too complicated for me :)) — Eugen

Setting out arguments always makes them seem more complicated than they are. I just quite like doing it. My point is just that in the sense of 'consciousness' used in this thread, it is not necessary that conscious things must be able to be knocked out.

Setting out arguments always makes them seem more complicated than they are. I just quite like doing it. My point is just that in the sense of 'consciousness' used in this thread, it is not necessary that conscious things must be able to be knocked out. — bert1

Yes, exactly. If panpsychism is right and consciousness is fundamental, there's no way you could make a basic element unconscious. The only way is to make it dissapear, if that's possible.

Yep.

The notion of consciousness is explained by opposing it to unconsciousness. We see the difference between a conscious and unconscious person. It can be applied to animals, at least to some extent. Even computers go to sleep. Perhaps plants sleep through winter. But rocks? Quarks?

Hence, the salient point of the reductio is the rejection of a somewhat derailed notion of consciousness:

2) If quarks are conscious then they can be knocked out, put to sleep (assumption) — bert1

If you are going to argue that rocks are conscious, you are also going to have to acknowledge and explain your novel use of the word "conscious", because you are not using it int he way it is used in, say, a first aid course.

A friend once asked me if jellyfish sleep. My reply was that you can't sleep if you are never quite awake.

If you are going to argue that rocks are conscious, you are also going to have to acknowledge and explain your novel use of the word "conscious" — Banno

It's not novel. It's roughly the first sense listed at dictionary.com:

"the state of being conscious; awareness of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc."

I'd want to perhaps cut a couple of those out if I'm talking about the consciousness of rocks, perhaps limit it to just to feelings and sensations, but the basic sense is the same I think. Philosophers put various glosses on this basic idea in order to make it clearer (or less clear for some) what they are talking about. Such glosses talk about experience, qualia (which I dislike), something it is like to be it, subjectivity, having a point of view, and so on.

Your insistence that the medical definition is the only one is very annoying.

Consciousness does not come in degrees — bert1

This is trivially not true even from an empirical perspective:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_level_of_consciousness

Such glosses talk about experience, qualia (which I dislike), something it is like to be it, subjectivity, having a point of view, and so on.

Your insistence that the medical definition is the only one is very annoying. — bert1

I'm not seeing the difference. The reason we call a knocked-out person 'unconscious' is because they don't appear to have those properties. When they 'come to' again, we mark that they have done so by the apparent return of those properties. If those properties collectively, define conciousness it sounds almost exactly like the medical definition.

Your insistence that the medical definition is the only one is very annoying. — bert1

Good.

I'm interested to see any evidence you have that a rock has feelings.

A healthy and awake baby is just as conscious as a distinguished PhD performing surgery. Right? — Outlander

Not quite. A healthy baby has delta brain waves. Same as a healthy adult has while asleep.

Panpsychism is true in the vague sense that consciousness can be constructed from common elements, but the metaphysics is bullshit. Its credence relies on materialism's apparent inscrutability. Nothing more. That it's taken seriously seems absurd at this point; progress in computational modelling (Joscha Bach, Anil Seth, etc.) is answering the Hard Problem incrementally. Chalmers, gifted as he is, hasn't been helpful.

Within a materialist paradigm, yes, consciousness exists on a spectrum, but it may be more complicated than it sounds. Consider the case of Washoe, the chimpanzee taught basic sign language: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washoe_(chimpanzee)

Researchers were unable to teach her beyond the level of a pre-schooler, and found she had a genetic learning limitation. The human brain therefore evolved past a cognitive tipping point, which, according to David Deutsch, affords us access to infinite knowledge of concepts, connections. An evolutionary event of some kind triggered the human brain to develop into a different kind of brain altogether. So though humans are objectively speaking more conscious than chimps, measuring beyond the tipping point becomes more subjective.

Accepting the above, it's still tempting to overthink conscious experience into mysticism. But it's probably more rationally intuitive. Human & animal rights have become more empathetic precisely because advances in global communication networks and an increasing number of interconnections with morality principles raised social consciousness as such. The same goes at the individual level, with a major step perhaps being the advent of writing, which allowed concepts to be broadly disseminated. Under this view, consciousness is simply the acute awareness of observable patterns that constitute reality: the more patterns one is able to be aware of simultaneously, the more conscious-feeling they'll probably be.

A supporting--more basic--observation can be found between differing lifestyle orientations. It's been argued that submission to social norms narrows the lateral scope of an individual's conscious awareness over time, that the more embedded in a given living routine one becomes, the less conscious of the world writ large they'll be; and that skepticism and non-acceptance and friction with social constructs promotes greater awareness of reality in general--baring in mind that awareness + attention are synonymous with consciousness, which in a materialist worldview they usually are. Thomas Pynchon had a cool way of framing it:

“Temporal bandwidth, is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar “∆ t” considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are."
– from Gravity’s Rainbow

Genetically, though, we're only optimised for a limited, socially-margined faculty to develop. One person can be more conscious than the next, but that same person may find themselves more disadvantaged the more conscious they become, especially without the requisite reasoning and decision-making capacity. Basically, the more conscious you are, the more effortful reality is to navigate through.

This is consistent with a common experience of psychoactive drugs: removed from habitual thought processes, conceptualisations are frequently novel in their comparative uniqueness, which sense of uniqueness is proportionate to how far removed from an embedded perspective they are. Hence the phrase "consciousness expanding" -- the extending of an awareness bubble encouraged by psychadelic ventures to the outside. (Fortunately meditation and other healthier practices have similar effect.)

Intelligence and consciousness are interrelated, too; natural fluid intelligence (taking abstraction capacity and creativity into account) reflects a genetic baseline, the extent to which one is able to incorporate new concepts into a functional model. An ability to learn more than average without becoming overwhelmed, affords greater consciousness expansion.

Meaning, it's very possible for a being/AI to be more conscious than any human can be. It would simply need to be simultaneously aware of more moment-relevant concepts than we're capable of.

That the 'feeling' of consciousness is strong enough to infer something inscrutable going on is not a rational argument. Conscious experience is just whatever your attention (and peripheral attention) is focused on, inclusive of thought. If someone or something can be consciously aware of more stuff than us, with wider-reaching well-functioning algorithms, it follows that more evolved organisms can be more conscious than we are.

Side-note: the language faculty has something to do with it. How conscious was Genie, would you say? Was she as conscious as we are? How would it seem jumping into her consciousness and back again? https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/14/genie-feral-child-los-angeles-researchers

^ the differential between language-developed persons and Genie, is perhaps where the crux of the debate rests; i.e. if from the inside of her mind the world appears and feels less vivid, it follows consciousness isn't constant; that it's variable, and evolving, and there's probably superorganisms out there way better at multitasking than us.

The degrees given in scales like these refer to differences in content, not in consciousness in the sense that the OP means it.

EDIT: What I said ^ is wrong. I should have said 'observable behaviour' not 'content'.

If something else would be conscious, it would be taken in charge and have a body. So no, there's not.

The degrees given in scales like these refer to differences in content, not in consciousness in the sense that the OP means it. — bert1

What is consciousness if not its content?

And isnt the content dependent upon the type of senses you have? Does more senses at work mean more consciousness for an entity?

What about others who have the same number as senses as I do but aren't as easily awoken when touched or spoken to? Are light sleepers more conscious than heavy sleepers?

And isnt the content dependent upon the type of senses you have? Does more senses at work mean more consciousness for an entity? — Harry Hindu

I think that there is a correspondence. It isn't adventitious that consciousness emerges along with the complexification of the central nervous system. I think the same process continues at a conceptual level, the more complex our conceptual schema, the more complex the consciousness. It seems intuitive.

So it's not necessarily the number of senses but the degree by which some sense is more sensitive than some other? Dogs' ears and noses are more complex than humans', but we have bigger brains. Some birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field, but humans can't without the aid of technology. So are these birds more or less conscious of the Earth's magnetic field than humans, or could it be said that we are equally conscious, just not in the same way, or by the same method, or the same senses.

The way that birds use their sense of the magnetic field would be different. They use it to navigate, but we can use it to determine the state of Earth's resistance to solar radiation and the state of Earth's core. So does the fact that humans can establish much larger and longer causal relationships with what we are sensing (we seem to have a better grasp of time at least in the long run as most animal's attentions spans are very short) mean that we are more conscious than they? Are humans more conscious of the threats facing this planet and our survival as a species from impending asteroid impacts, nearby supernovas, etc. than other animals? Why or why not? And in this sense is not consciousness just another word for awareness?

While I agree consciousness is its content, and would certainly seem to be variable in degree, do you see that the link you gave doesn’t address that idea? All the table in the link gives, is the relative states of being aware, which has nothing to do with the manifold of representations of which one may or may not be aware. All it details is the relative ability to employ the contents of consciousness, not with whether or not the content is available to employ. I think the title of the link is a misnomer.

But if one wishes to think being aware and being conscious are the same thing, or arise from the same conditions, the table might hold. But they do not, necessarily, so.........

But if one wishes to think being aware and being conscious are the same thing — Mww

I personally do think awareness and consciousness are synonymous. We are in the arena of definition now, of course.

And in this sense is not consciousness just another word for awareness? — Harry Hindu

As I just responded to Mww, I'm of the opinion that consciousness and awareness are the same.

But if one wishes to think being aware and being conscious are the same thing
— Mww

I personally do think awareness and consciousness are synonymous. — Pantagruel

Synonymous, yes, insofar as awareness is taken to be the quality of being aware just as consciousness is taken to be the quality of being conscious, so synonymity is in the category to which they both equally belong. Or even if you want to call it a state of being, or a condition as such, in as much as redness is the state of being red, fitness the state of being fit, so too awareness and consciousness are the respective states of being of each.

But you just informed Harry that you think awareness and consciousness are the same, which is much more than merely synonymous. Case in point, I can be quite conscious, and still be unaware of something....
(How many times have you been so thoroughly engrossed in something that the sound the person beside you made with his speech, left no impression on your ears?)
.....whereas whenever I am aware of anything whatsoever, I absolutely must be conscious simultaneously with it. Therefore, the two would seem to be different in some measurable respect. And if those two are different, then it follows that awareness and consciousness must also be measurably different in a corresponding respect. Perhaps still synonymous by singular category, but significantly disparate in use, occurrence, condition, or something else. Whatever is sufficient to explain such possible difference.

Parsimony suggests awareness is a function of sensibility, consciousness is a function of rationality. With these hypotheticals, the construction of a theory in cognitive science becomes much more internally consistent, hence more efficient.