I believe that "consciousness" is a spectrum of capabilities — 013zen

That much is not needed: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/conscious


Things without a mind are not conscious/aware.

That much is not needed: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/conscious — Lionino

I Wouldn't say we are using 'conscious' in the same sense in the two sentences:

"Tim is conscious and in the hospital"
and
"Human's are conscious due to their brains"

In the first example, its clearly being used synonymously with being aware, and in the second sense, which is the sense I believe OP to be using, we can't simply substitute "awareness".

I Wouldn't say we are using 'conscious' in the same sense in the two sentences:

"Tim is conscious and in the hospital"
and
"Human's are conscious due to their brains" — 013zen

Well, I would.

In the first example, its clearly being used synonymously with being aware, and in the second sense, which is the sense I believe OP to be using, we can't simply substitute "awareness". — 013zen

That the substitution sounds funky in that one phrase is a matter that the language relies on pragmatics more than semantics in that case. The two words pretty much mean the same thing, just like "fast" and "quick" mean the same thing.

Well, I would. — Lionino

How about in an instance where we have two individuals: Tim and Nancy. Both recently awoke in the hospital after major surgery. Tim had triple bypass surgery, and Nancy had a full frontal lobotomy.

Clearly, I would say:

"Tim is conscious and in the hospital"
and
"Nancy is conscious and in the hospital"

But, if I were to ask in the sense of the OP: "Is Tim conscious in the same sense as Nancy?" we would all, I think, answer 'no'.

Things without a mind are not conscious/aware. — Lionino

Sure, but there are no things without a mind.

Sure, but there are no things without a mind. — bert1

Ok, so you are a panpsychists. Most people disagree, so do I. We can leave it at that.

Tim had triple bypass surgery, and Nancy had a full frontal lobotomy. — 013zen

Damn.

But, if I were to ask in the sense of the OP: "Is Tim conscious in the same sense as Nancy?" we would all, I think, answer 'no'. — 013zen

Are lobomites conscious? If yes, they are conscious in the same way; if no, "Nancy is conscious and in the hospital" is an incorrect statement, and should be changed.

The counterargument is that what we mean by "conscious" is in fact an umbrella of related properties. But this is not a point I want to debate so I will just concede.

It's a difficult word to tackle because of semantics but as far as I gathered, they meant has a lack of an "I" sensation/experience of self, therefore little to no agency to apply to a self, and act mindlessly on mere precribed impulses. — Benj96

How do you imagine an intelligent animal presents that "I' or "self" to itself?
To clarify my question, for me, its easy, I use those words "I" and "myself" and variations thereof.
Even if I "think" I am contemplating "myself" silently, without reference to those words, those words underlie such thinking.
How, I wonder, for animals?

Are lobomites conscious? If yes, they are conscious in the same way; if no, "Nancy is conscious and in the hospital" is an incorrect statement, and should be changed.

The counterargument is that what we mean by "conscious" is in fact an umbrella of related properties. But this is not a point I want to debate so I will just concede. — Lionino

They prefer to be called frontally incapable, I believe :p

But, my point is I don't know how to answer your question. If you're asking, "Are people that have had lobotomies aware of things?" I would say, in many cases - yes. But, I would think that they've lost some meaningful capacity that I think could be understood as a lessening of consciousness.

I'm curious what you mean by "awareness" though, like, if say, a motion detecting camera spots me, and follows my movements, would that count as awareness, or is it something more complicated for you?

I'm curious what you mean by "awareness" though — 013zen

I don't mean much else than what is understood by the word in English. That conscious and aware cannot be replaced one by the other in some contexts is no mystery — some grammarians claim there is no such thing as a perfect synonym —, but generally those two words are synonyms, the thesaurus would show so.

if say, a motion detecting camera spots me, and follows my movements, would that count as awareness, or is it something more complicated for you? — 013zen

Good question. Most people would say sponges are not conscious, but they are "aware" of their surroundings because they react to stimulus. But then again, are they reacting any differently than when a rock reacts when we kick it by flying away into my neighbour Giorgios' window? In a way, a sponge reacts to its environment through a series of chemical reactions in its structure, which are physics-based — in the deep end it is all Newton's third law. We call mechanisms "responsive" too, when we touch a phone's screen but it doesn't register the touch, it is not responsive. Yet in most cases calling the phone "aware" sounds off. You could say the phone is aware of you touching it (touchscreen software is running) but a virus may be blocking the script that opens the app or slides the screen.
All in all, this is barely even philosophy, it is pragmatics of the English language.

Things without a mind are not conscious/aware.
— Lionino

Sure, but there are no things without a mind.
— bert1

Ok, so you are a panpsychists. Most people disagree, so do I. We can leave it at that. — Lionino

I'm a panpsychist, and I also disagree.

Disagree that there is nothing without a mind? :chin:

All in all, this is barely even philosophy, it is pragmatics of the English language. — Lionino

As Wittgenstein once said:

“All philosophy is Critique of language” (4.0031).

Most people would say sponges are not conscious — Lionino

I would be willing to ascribe consciousness to a sponge, just not the same level of consciousness as I would ascribe to you.

But then again, are they reacting any differently than when a rock reacts when we kick it by flying away into my neighbour Giorgios' window? — Lionino

I take your point, that both are the product of mechanical laws, but I could say there is a distinction to made here insofar as the sponge’s reacting to external stimulus is the result of an internal process responding to the external stimuli, while the rock’s is due to an external process acting on the rock with no internal process.

The phone is a good mediator example insofar as it does have an internal state that responds to external stimulus, but still I think there’s a distinction here between the phone and the sponge. I can’t quite tease it out, yet, though. :chin:

What do you think?

As Wittgenstein once said: — 013zen

Not the biggest of fans.

I would be willing to ascribe consciousness to a sponge — 013zen

The question is on what grounds, if you are not a panpsychist.

What do you think? — 013zen

I don't think there is any. Let me know if you find out.

The question is on what grounds, if you are not a panpsychist. — Lionino

I am not a panpsychist, I find the position unintelligible.

There seems to be a meaningful distinction between on the one hand, things like:

1. rocks, cups, tables, etc
and
2. amoebas, sponges, dogs, humans, etc

and it doesn't appear to be due to complexity.

In what this distinction subsists is the question.

Clearly the difference between those two is that one is alive and other is not. If that difference is the basis, amoebas would be conscious, but they are not.

Disagree that there is nothing without a mind? :chin: — Lionino

Correct. The idea is that there's a mental property, just as there are physical properties (mass, charge, etc.). Although some panpsychists think that mental property is an actual mind, or consciousness, not all do. My own thinking is along the lines of proto-consciousness. As the physical properties combine in various ways that give us macro physical properties, like liquidity, perhaps proto-consciousness combines to give us consciousness.

Most people would say sponges are not conscious, but they are "aware" of their surroundings because they react to stimulus. But then again, are they reacting any differently than when a rock reacts when we kick it by flying away into my neighbour Giorgios' window? In a way, a sponge reacts to its environment through a series of chemical reactions in its structure, which are physics-based — in the deep end it is all Newton's third law. — Lionino

I would say they are reacting differently. The rock kicked through the window is a chain of brute-force, physical interactions. Like dominoes.

In Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged From Chaos, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam give a bare-bones definition of mind:

A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body. This process of changing inputs into outputs—of changing sensation into useful behavior—is thinking, the defining activity of a mind.

Accordingly, every mind requires a minimum of two thinking elements:
•​A sensor that responds to its environment
•​A doer that acts upon its environment

Some familiar examples of sensors that are part of your own mind include the photon-sensing rods and cones in your retina, the vibration-sensing hair cells in your ears, and the sourness-sensing taste buds on your tongue. A sensor interacts with a doer, which does something. A doer performs some action that impinges upon the world and thereby influences the body’s health and well-being. Common examples of doers include the twitchy muscle cells in your finger, the sweat-producing apocrine cells in your sweat glands, and the liquid-leaking serous cells in your tear ducts.

A mind, then, is defined by what it does, rather than what it is. “Mind” is an action noun, like “tango,” “communication,” or “game.” A mind responds. A mind transforms. A mind acts. A mind adapts to the ceaseless assault of aimless chaos. — Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

They then discuss several increasingly complex minds. The sponge is not one of them. They start with the simplest existing mind, that of the archaea, which has two sensors (rhodopsin) and two doers (flagella, more properly called archaella). When the light changes, the rhodopsin changes shape. This begins a chain of chemical events that reach the archaella, which move, thus moving the archaea.

Chemical reactions are, of course, nothing but physical events. But it's not the same as a solid object hitting another solid object, and moving it simply because that's what happens when solid objects hit each other. If the archaea is not reacting any differently than the kicked rock, are we?

Ok, but the definition of panpsychist I am aware of is someone who thinks all things (alive or not) have a mind.

The rock kicked through the window is a chain of brute-force, physical interactions. Like dominoes. — Patterner

So is the sponge, but with more steps.

A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body. — Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

One does not need to think a lot to see the issue with this physicalist account of what a "mind" is. The problem is that this definition of "mind" also describes things that we don't call mind. At this point, you are just changing the definition of 'mind' to mean something that seems pretty close to what we call metabolism.

This process of changing inputs into outputs—of changing sensation into useful behavior—is thinking, the defining activity of a mind. — Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

Well, that is not what thinking means. I can think without an input (beyond any argument if one rejects weak tabula rasa¹), and I can think without producing useful behaviour. In any case, I can make a little Arduino robot right now (in two weeks once the Amazon parts arrive) that does exactly that, but the robot is not thinking.
Also, there should be a space around the em dashes, ugh.

They start with the simplest existing mind, that of the archaea, which has two sensors (rhodopsin) and two doers (flagella, more properly called archaella) — Patterner

There are plenty of things that have sensors and doers and are robots. It seems they focus only on life, but life is a self-replicating thing with metabolism — which is why virus don't typically fall under life, no metabolism —, so they are talking about the metabolic aspect of life and calling it "mind", but we already have thousands of great biology books that talk exactly about that without doing such semantic juggling,

1 – The view that the mind needs experience to work, against the strong version that states the mind starts completely empty.

Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam might be brilliant neuroscientists, but they are clearly not good philosophers.

Are all living things conscious? — Christoffer

Yes, all. Including organisms and plants. They all perceive and react to their environment. Because they all want to survive. And multiply.

Yes, all. Including organisms and plants. They all perceive and react to their environment. Because they all want to survive. And multiply. — Alkis Piskas

Enactivist approaches argue that perception and reaction are not sufficient for consciousness. What is required is a self-organizing and self-correcting anticipative purposiveness. Living systems are normatively oriented, defining their environment in relation to their ongoing functioning. Consciousness is intrinsically affective , and affectivity arises out of the organisms’s ability recognize what is better or worse for it in relation to how it is functioning. It’s purposes and aims cannot be reduced to simple ‘survival’ or ‘multiplication’ but the survival of a normative way of functioning.

Ok, but the definition of panpsychist I am aware of is someone who thinks all things (alive or not) have a mind. — Lionino

I, of course, don't know the source of your definition. But none of these are nearly as cut & dried as "all things (alive or not) have a mind."

Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world.
...
The word “panpsychism” literally means that everything has a mind. However, in contemporary debates it is generally understood as the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. Thus, in conjunction with the widely held assumption (which will be reconsidered below) that fundamental things exist only at the micro-level, panpsychism entails that at least some kinds of micro-level entities have mentality, and that instances of those kinds are found in all things throughout the material universe. So whilst the panpsychist holds that mentality is distributed throughout the natural world—in the sense that all material objects have parts with mental properties—she needn’t hold that literally everything has a mind, e.g., she needn’t hold that a rock has mental properties (just that the rock’s fundamental parts do). — SEP

Panpsychism is the view that all things have a mind or a mind-like quality.
...
Panpsychism, then, is not a formal theory of mind. Rather, it is a conjecture about how widespread the phenomenon of mind is in the universe. Panpsychism does not necessarily attempt to define “mind” (although many panpsychists do this), nor does it necessarily explain how mind relates to the objects that possess it. As a result, panpsychism is more of an overarching concept, a kind of meta-theory of mind. More details are required to incorporate it into a fully-developed theory of mind. — IEP

Panpsychism, taken literally, is the doctrine that everything has a mind. In practice, people who call themselves panpsychists are not committed to as strong a doctrine. They are not committed to the thesis that the number two has a mind, or that the Eiffel tower has a mind, or that the city of Canberra has a mind, even if they believe in the existence of numbers, towers, and cities.

Instead, we can understand panpsychism as the thesis that some fundamental physical entities have mental states. — Chalmers

Consider the version of panpsychism that holds that there is a material universe, and that a fundamental and universal (and not at all understood) property of all matter, from the smallest portion up, is that it is experience-realizing or experience-involving. — Galen Strawson on in Mental Reality

And here are quotes about it.

In this article, Goff writes:

Panpsychism is sometimes caricatured as the view that fundamental physical entities such as electrons have thoughts; that electrons are, say, driven by existential angst. However, panpsychism as defended in contemporary philosophy is the view that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous, where to be conscious is simply to have subjective experience of some kind. This doesn’t necessarily imply anything as sophisticated as thoughts.

Of course in human beings consciousness is a sophisticated thing, involving subtle and complex emotions, thoughts and sensory experiences. But there seems nothing incoherent with the idea that consciousness might exist in some extremely basic forms. We have good reason to think that the conscious experiences a horse has are much less complex than those of a human being, and the experiences a chicken has are much less complex than those of a horse. As organisms become simpler perhaps at some point the light of consciousness suddenly switches off, with simpler organisms having no subjective experience at all. But it is also possible that the light of consciousness never switches off entirely, but rather fades as organic complexity reduces, through flies, insects, plants, amoeba, and bacteria. For the panpsychist, this fading-whilst-never-turning-off continuum further extends into inorganic matter, with fundamental physical entities – perhaps electrons and quarks – possessing extremely rudimentary forms of consciousness, which reflects their extremely simple nature.

In this Ted Talk, Chalmers says:

Even a photon has some degree of consciousness. The idea is not that photons are intelligent, or thinking. You know, it’s not that a photon is wracked with angst because it’s thinking, "Aaa! I'm always buzzing around near the speed of light! I never get to slow down and smell the roses!" No, not like that. But the thought is maybe the photons might have some element of raw, subjective feeling. Some primitive precursor to consciousness.

In Panpsychism in the West, Skrbina writes:

Minds of atoms may conceivably be, for example, a stream of instantaneous memory-less moments of experience.

I, of course, don't know the source of your definition — Patterner

It seems those quotes generally agree with my definition :grin:
But I got it from the IEP.

But none of these are nearly as cut & dried as "all things (alive or not) have a mind." — Patterner

Seems like a kind of biopsychism then https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/20323/

But the thought is maybe the photons might have some element of raw, subjective feeling. Some primitive precursor to consciousness.

I am aware of that view. But it ultimately reminds me of idealism, though there is likely some minute difference between the two.

A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body.
— Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

One does not need to think a lot to see the issue with this physicalist account of what a "mind" is. The problem is that this definition of "mind" also describes things that we don't call mind. At this point, you are just changing the definition of 'mind' to mean something that seems pretty close to what we call metabolism. — Lionino

Is it metabolism when an organism's sensor detects poison, and, because of the signal it seems to the doet, the doer takes the organism away from the poison? What was the beginning of thinking, if not this?

But the thought is maybe the photons might have some element of raw, subjective feeling. Some primitive precursor to consciousness.

I am aware of that view. But it ultimately reminds me of idealism, though there is likely some minute difference between the two. — Lionino

Perhaps, although I don't know much of anything about idealism. Regardless, it's not a belief that the photon has a mind.

Yes, all. Including organisms and plants. They all perceive and react to their environment. Because they all want to survive. And multiply. — Alkis Piskas

Not sure why you quoted me with the title of the thread, but consciousness require awareness. It doesn't require self-awareness, but awareness of the processes that occurs to them and reactions by them. A rock isn't measurably aware of the hammer hitting it, a bug is.

But I still don't know what you are actually answering to or why you quoted the thread's title as if I asked it?

Enactivist approaches argue that perception and reaction are not sufficient for consciousness. — Joshs

Well, enactivism holds that cognition is a necessary condition for the existence of consciousness. In my discussions with people on the subject of consciousness, I realized that most of them add such conditions, even thinking. So, anyone can add what condition one thinks is necessary for consciousness. So, what this actually means is different definitions of consciousness. That is everyone has a different perspective on the subject. This reminds of the alegory of different people looking at an elephant from different angles. So any fruitful discussion or conclusion on this subject is actually impossible, isnt it?

Consciousness is intrinsically affective, and affectivity arises out of the organisms’s ability recognize what is better or worse for it in relation to how it is functioning. — Joshs

This is exactly what I said. Here we see moods, feelings and emotions being part of consciuousness. So, according to this, if I don't have any particular mood, feeling or emotion it means that I am unconscious!

Do you see where do all these "additives" to consciousness lead? If I'm just looking at a wall, without having any cognition and without thinking or feeling anything --just looking-- it means I am unconscious! :smile:

Not sure why you quoted me with the title of the thread — Christoffer

Yes, I did.

consciousness require awareness. — Christoffer

None of them requires the other. Consciousness and awareness are similar concepts. They can be even used alternatively in some cases.

It doesn't require self-awareness, but awareness of the processes that occurs to them and reactions by them. A rock isn't measurably aware of the hammer hitting it, a bug is. — Christoffer

Right.

But I still don't know what you are actually answering to or why you quoted the thread's title as if I asked it? — Christoffer

In my turn, I can't see your problem with this. :smile:
Isn't your title "Are all living things conscious?" a question? And isn't my answer congruent with it?

Isn't your title "Are all living things conscious?" a question? And isn't my answer congruent with it? — Alkis Piskas

Are you conscious and aware of the fact that I didn't create this thread and that the title question isn't mine? :sweat:

Ha! You are right, my friend. The OP is Benj96's. I really don't know how I got you involved in all this.
But then, you should have stopped me from the beginning. Instead, you reacted with comments like "consciousness require awareness", etc. so you extended this wrong thread. This is not my fault! :smile:

Anyway, nice to make your acquaintance. See you around ...

Thank God that's settled. :lol: