3 ms·
Can you have consciousness without symbolic references to emotional states? "I am hungry, I am thirsty, my battery pack needs recharging or I will die soon.."
by photochemsyn 3y ago
Can you have consciousness without symbolic references to emotional states?
"I am hungry, I am thirsty, my battery pack needs recharging or I will die soon.."
It's true that wild animals communicate their internal states to others via various cues and this goes up and down the whole complexity spectrum, from ants signalling distress due to attack by other ants, up to humans sending messages to other humans in times of war... but 'consciousness' seems to imply the ability to constuct a symbolic line of communication in fairly great detail.
Here's a definition of conscious communication, perhaps at the early limit: "Here is a seed, that I took from a fruit. If you plant this seed, it will grow into a tree, from which you can harvest more fruit."
As far as I know, only humans have figured out how to transmit that degree of informatoin to others of their species, right? So we define something like that as a (fairly arbitrary) definition of 'consciousness'.
- perfmode 3y agoallow the mind to come to rest consciousness is prior to mental activity
- photochemsyn 3y agoBy this definition, ants, trees, and mountains are conscious. A valid viewpoint, although hard to explain to people who think humans are somehow fundamentally different from chimpanzees. Now, I don't think chimpanzees have ever been shown to engage in conscious agriculture, have they? Learning to start fires, is a debatable question.
- gpvos 3y agoAgriculture came pretty late in human development too. You sure we were unconscious before that, or even before language? Conscious - and intelligent - tool use has been observed at least in crows and apes.
- gpvos 3y agoI would classify your last example as intelligence, not consciousness. I think most people would agree that most animals, at the very least many mammals, have some form of consciousness. It may even be that our consciousness doesn't differ qualitatively from theirs, and the only difference is the level of intelligence.