Consciousness
in sentence
652 examples of Consciousness in a sentence
That's the kind of radical idea that we need to explore if you want to have a purely reductionist brain-based theory of
consciousness.
At the same time, for me and for many other people, that view is a bit too close to simply denying the datum of
consciousness
to be satisfactory.
The first crazy idea is that
consciousness
is fundamental.
I think that's the situation we're in with
consciousness.
If you can't explain
consciousness
in terms of the existing fundamentals — space, time, mass, charge — then as a matter of logic, you need to expand the list.
The natural thing to do is to postulate
consciousness
itself as something fundamental, a fundamental building block of nature.
What we then need is to study the fundamental laws governing consciousness, the laws that connect
consciousness
to other fundamentals: space, time, mass, physical processes.
Well I think something like that is the situation we're in with
consciousness.
The second crazy idea is that
consciousness
might be universal.
Every system might have some degree of
consciousness.
Even a photon has some degree of
consciousness.
But the thought is maybe photons might have some element of raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to
consciousness.
Some motivation comes from the first crazy idea, that
consciousness
is fundamental.
A deeper motivation comes from the idea that perhaps the most simple and powerful way to find fundamental laws connecting
consciousness
to physical processing is to link
consciousness
to information.
Wherever there's information processing, there's
consciousness.
Complex information processing, like in a human, complex
consciousness.
Simple information processing, simple
consciousness.
And he supposes that phi goes along with
consciousness.
So in a human brain, incredibly large amount of information integration, high degree of phi, a whole lot of
consciousness.
In a mouse, medium degree of information integration, still pretty significant, pretty serious amount of
consciousness.
On Tononi's theory, there's still going to be a non-zero degree of
consciousness.
In effect, he's proposing a fundamental law of consciousness: high phi, high
consciousness.
Now, I don't know if this theory is right, but it's actually perhaps the leading theory right now in the science of consciousness, and it's been used to integrate a whole range of scientific data, and it does have a nice property that it is in fact simple enough you can write it on the front of a t-shirt.
Another final motivation is that panpsychism might help us to integrate
consciousness
into the physical world.
Well, on the panpsychist view, you can leave the equations of physics as they are, but you can take them to be describing the flux of
consciousness.
That's what physics really is ultimately doing, describing the flux of
consciousness.
On this view, it's
consciousness
that puts the fire into the equations.
On that view,
consciousness
doesn't dangle outside the physical world as some kind of extra.
So I think when you think about it, this tends to transfigure your views, whereas what matters for ethical purposes and moral considerations, not so much the fact of consciousness, but the degree and the complexity of
consciousness.
It's also natural to ask about
consciousness
in other systems, like computers.
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