Why would they need to be? What makes that "greater". More "superior". What have we done with that "depth" that hasn't been at the expense of some 'other'?
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Plant Sentience
- Thread starter The Hammer
- Start date
Why would they need to be? What makes that "greater". More "superior". What have we done with that "depth" that hasn't been at the expense of some 'other'?
It doesn't necessarily make us superior, anymore than a Cheetah is superior because its the fastest or the Blue Whale is superior because it's the largest. I was simply stating that's why humans are the scale for sentience, because our sentience is demonstrably superior.
I disagree on the basis of there being no scale, except the one we as humans invented. Which of course puts us at the top..
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No. The smallest unit capable of being called “alive” is the cell; the smaller viruses, which infect cells, are not condidered by biologists to be living things. Atoms are definitely not alive.
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I personally define consciousness as self-awareness. How that can be determined is another question.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
Maybe, in light that our entire make up is only compromised of atoms, the quality then remains, of which life is essentially non living as well. Essentially, that life itself, dosent actually exist either.
Why Life Does Not Really Exist
I have been fascinated with living things since childhood. Growing up in northern California, I spent a lot of time playing outdoors among plants and animals.
Hmmm… this is an interesting idea. I think that one aspect which defines life, though, is cellular metabolism, which all living things experience, and that another is cellular mitosis.
FredVB
Member
Responsiveness is demonstrable and shown. Conscious awareness is not proven, nor really useful, as aside from responsiveness nothing can be done, for a plant to fight or flee. Nervous systems of organisms are associated with that, and the creatures with brains do show sentience, that any among us can see, with looking. Jellyfish may, possibly, but plants don't, if we understand responsiveness is not meaning the same thing.
Isn't responsiveness awareness? Isn't consciousness simply awareness, from the most basic level of being able to response to the world at whatever level that is, all the way to cognitive self-reflective awareness? Isn't it really simple a degree of complexity and sophistication of the same basic thing, which is consciousness itself, which is present at all levels, all the way up and all way down?
wellwisher
Well-Known Member
Living is because of water. Experiments were done where single living cells were dehydrated and water was replaced by a large number of solvents, postulated to be possible solvents for life on other planets.The results were nothing worked in any of these other solvents, down to individual enzymes. Once water was added to lifeless dehydrated cells, everything worked and the state we call life appeared. Organic alone was not enough nor is water replaceable for life to appear on earth. All the biochemistry of life, on earth, is tuned to water. Water was the source of natural selection at the chemical level, so all can work in water.
Water is critical to the workings of all things in the cell. It is also critical to the integration of all these many things, and thereby can induce the integrated state we call life. Water can transmit information through the connected hydrogen bonding matrix of the aqueous continuum, within life, allowing an integrated affect needed for life.
Plants, like animals, are also integrated by water. They are not just alive, but have precursors of consciousness, which is also integrated by water. The brain is easier to see, than just sensory organics without a brain. Water creates an integrated response to the environment within plants, but without all the extra data processes found in animal life.
PureX
Veteran Member
A pressure switch is responsive to it's environment. But does that mean it's "aware" of it's surroundings?
It's a semantic debate, of course. But I perceive no logical advantage to be gained by conflating these terms as if they mean the same things. Being environmentally responsive may be indicative of awareness, but by itself it is not 'awareness'.
It's a semantic debate, of course. But I perceive no logical advantage to be gained by conflating these terms as if they mean the same things. Being environmentally responsive may be indicative of awareness, but by itself it is not 'awareness'.
An AI "thinks", but is it really consciousness? My point being that mechanical devices mimicking nature, is not the same thing as nature.
Think of the problem with the apologists "watchmaker" argument, that you can't find a watch out in the jungle and not assume a watchmaker, in support of their idea of a external intentional deity acting as a "designer". The problem with this argument is we are not talking about mechanical devices. We are talking about organic natural biological systems.
The whole conceptual problem with this type of thinking, and the silly "watchmaker" fallacy apologists argument itself, stems back from Descartes who viewed living organisms as mechanical systems.
In Descartes’ mechanistic conception of the world, all of nature works according to mechanical laws, and everything in the material world can be explained in terms of the arrangement and movements of its parts. This implies that one should be able to understand all aspects of complex structures – plants, animals, or the human body – by reducing them to their smallest constituent parts. This philosophical position is known as Cartesian reductionism.
The fallacy of the reductionist view lies in the fact that, while there is nothing wrong in saying that the structures of all living organisms are composed of smaller parts, and ultimately of molecules, this does not imply that their properties can be explained in terms of molecules alone.
The mechanistic view of life (Chapter 2) - The Systems View of Life
The Systems View of Life - April 2014
This view of nature adopted from Descartes is well-symbolized by the "Digesting Duck" automaton that we are all familiar with: Watches, Automatons, 'Soul,' And The Digesting Duck Of Jacques de Vaucanson
So it's really not a semantic argument, but a matter of natural, orgainic, living systems, verus a mechanized imitation of them. A pressure value, is not conscious, but a duck is. A duck has consciousness and life force. A pressure valve does not. A watch is not a human being.
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PureX
Veteran Member
That humans create and use tools is a "natural" phenomenon. But that doesn't make the tools we create self-aware, even if they can mimic our self-awareness. A pressure valve may mimic awareness of it's surroundings because it will consistently and predictably react the same way to changes in pressure but it's not actually aware of these changes nor is it choosing to react to them. It's just a mechanism we humans created to mimic our own awareness and choice.
A plant that changes it's orientation to follow the sun across the sky so as to maximize photosynthesis is not a man made mechanism, but it is a biological mechanism involving a temperature increase that's causing cell contraction that then changes the plant's structural orientation. It is just a bio-mechanical response mechanism. Not an actual awareness or a choice.
I'm not saying that a plant life form cannot be 'aware' in some limited way, but I think we need to be careful to recognize that mechanisms often mimic awareness without actually posessing any actual awareness. And this is true whether that mechanism is man made or or "natural".
What do you imagine "actual awareness or a choice" to entail? The result of a conscious thought process? I would not limit awareness, or consciousness, to the active thought level. These behaviors that you described are self-adapted systems in response to the environment, which then become, I suppose you could call them unconcious programmed patterns of nature, which are still a part of consciousness itself just as it is in all of us. We instinctively act and do and follow certain programs without any higher-level conscious awareness of it, but it was something "learned" at some point in deep history through some type of awareness handed down to us. It's not just mechanics imitating consciousness.
To say the plant is aware through consciousness itself, at a very deep subconscious layer, and not just biomechanical is not unreasonable. But to say that the plant "thinks" is a stretch. "Hey look, the sun! Time to unfurl my leaves!".
But while there are biomechanical mechanisms being used, such as temperature and cell interactions, that doesn't mean it is nothing more than that. That's like saying love is nothing but chemicals, or thoughts are nothing but neurons firing. There are deep problems with that view of reality.Again, how are you defining "actual awareness"? Cognitive thoughts? I don't. A tapeworm which has no brain is clearly consciously aware of its environment enough to make rudimentary decisions. "food, not food", and so forth.
All I am saying is that what we are doing at our highly sophisticated levels of language and decision trees and whatnot, is all just a higher developed expression of that same fundamental consciousness itself found in all living things. IIt doesn't matter if it's a plant or a goldfish, or a snail, or a human. Consciousness doesn't magically appear out of nothing in the evolutionary tree, like "poof" and then there's Adam and Eve in the garden with fully developed minds and language.
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PureX
Veteran Member
Yes, but that is quite weird and illogical. As awareness by definition implies being cognizant of one's cognizance. And this IS specifically a conscious thought process.
What you just described, however, is not AWARENESS. To be aware is to be cognizant of one's cognizance. Which is the source of our ability to choose a response.
Again, you are refusing to recognize actual AWARENESS. And so you are ignoring the possibility of choice that results from it. Once we become AWARE of our thought process, we can opt to follow it's proscriptions, or not to.
To claim that the plant is 'aware', is simply false, because whatever response mechanisms it may have, they do not rise to the level of being cognizant of it's cognizance.To say the plant is aware through consciousness itself, at a very deep subconscious layer, and not just biomechanical is not unreasonable. But to say that the plant "thinks" is a stretch. "Hey look, the sun! Time to unfurl my leaves!".
The tape worm is not "aware" of it's environment. It simply has a number of mechanisms that enable it to detect conditions within it's environment and react to them. Detection/reaction is not 'awareness'. As was pointed out by the pressure switch example.
However, awareness occurs by degree. So if the tape worm has a central processing point where such detection information is collected, processed, and various auto-reactions are formulated and sent out to the organism's reactive functions. Then we might decide that some very rudimentary form of 'awareness', and subsequent choice, is occurring.
And you are wrong. Because not all living things rise to the level of awareness. Many of them are not cognizant of being cognizant. They are simply bio-mechanical mechanisms that possess the ability to detect changes in their environment and to respond in a self-sustaining way to them. They are not 'aware' of their environment, or of themselves existening within that environment, or of their being any choice regarding how they respond to the changes that they detect. They are 'automatic'.
Awareness is a condition that exists ideologically. It exists and existed before any life form achieves it, as a fundamental existential possibility. Some life forms have evolved to achieve it, to varying degrees, while others have not. But it isn't a requisite of or for life. This is where I think you are profoundly mistaken. Life is/was an existential possibility of it's own, that existed before any particular combination of mater and energy managed achieved it. And of course only a very particular combination of these was able to do so.
What you're failing to recognize, and I suspect you're going to try very hard to deny, is that what we call "life" and what we call "sentience" (cognizant awareness) are ideological states of being that existed as possibilities BEFORE they existed as material facts. That matter and energy are manifesting what was already deemed existentially possible nefre the Big Bang, by some means that we are completely as yet unaware of. Life and sentience didn't just "accidentally happen". They are WAY to complex and sophisticated for that to ever have happened, if anything could have happened that way, at all (which is logically extremely doubtful).
wellwisher
Well-Known Member
Humans have two centers of consciousness, which allows us to become self aware. We; ego, are self aware of inner self based complementary and conflicting unconscious reactions, to the environment. Like two eyes, which give us stereo-optic vision, two centers of consciousness create a unique 3-D affect for human consciousness.
Here is an interesting observation. Computers are not alive or conscious. However, any computer can sense, read, memorize, process language, and do math at a much faster pace than humans. As such, these base activities alone do not make humans conscious, or this alone would be sufficient to define computers as conscious. Most people are really semi-conscious like computers, but at a much slower pace than computers.
Consciousness, therefore, would need to be connected to things that computers cannot do. Computers do not have a secondary POV., They only have a primary center; learning based on a program. This is true of most humans egos; social programs stemming from aspects of the cultural super ego. People who belong to political parties, for example, all memorize the same book, like a computer can do, faster. It is the artist and innovators that deviate from what is known, to become self aware and fully conscious. Computers do not do this.
If a computer was to become conscious, it would be able to have choices beyond its primary programming. This would imply a secondary center, had formed, with will and choice part from the primary. A secondary center; ego in humans, consolidated about 6000 years ago and could question and alter its natural instinctive program; inner self, by memorizing learned knowledge of good and evil, which any computer can do. This conflicted with the natural programming of the inner self, allowing the ego to become self aware. Adam and Eve are symbolic of the first two consolidated ego centers; male and female, when humans first became self aware; stereo-optic vision. This was the appeal of the forbidden tree; stereo-optic vision like a god.
After they eat of the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve become aware they are naked. This did not come from their natural instinct; inner self, since naked was natural. It came from the ego memory who had learned differently; knowledge of good and evil. This led to an internal conflict; becoming self aware of a conflict. This reaction was a tell for self awareness; will and choice.
Ancient psychology was more advanced that what we have today. Today, psychology is mostly about the ego, but not always the inner self, which also became self aware due to the ego. Paradise was much less complicated; unity of the instinctive program. However, the stereo-optic affect of a self aware consciousness, offers the potential to update the programs of both centers; conscious evolution.
Here is an interesting observation. Computers are not alive or conscious. However, any computer can sense, read, memorize, process language, and do math at a much faster pace than humans. As such, these base activities alone do not make humans conscious, or this alone would be sufficient to define computers as conscious. Most people are really semi-conscious like computers, but at a much slower pace than computers.
Consciousness, therefore, would need to be connected to things that computers cannot do. Computers do not have a secondary POV., They only have a primary center; learning based on a program. This is true of most humans egos; social programs stemming from aspects of the cultural super ego. People who belong to political parties, for example, all memorize the same book, like a computer can do, faster. It is the artist and innovators that deviate from what is known, to become self aware and fully conscious. Computers do not do this.
If a computer was to become conscious, it would be able to have choices beyond its primary programming. This would imply a secondary center, had formed, with will and choice part from the primary. A secondary center; ego in humans, consolidated about 6000 years ago and could question and alter its natural instinctive program; inner self, by memorizing learned knowledge of good and evil, which any computer can do. This conflicted with the natural programming of the inner self, allowing the ego to become self aware. Adam and Eve are symbolic of the first two consolidated ego centers; male and female, when humans first became self aware; stereo-optic vision. This was the appeal of the forbidden tree; stereo-optic vision like a god.
After they eat of the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve become aware they are naked. This did not come from their natural instinct; inner self, since naked was natural. It came from the ego memory who had learned differently; knowledge of good and evil. This led to an internal conflict; becoming self aware of a conflict. This reaction was a tell for self awareness; will and choice.
Ancient psychology was more advanced that what we have today. Today, psychology is mostly about the ego, but not always the inner self, which also became self aware due to the ego. Paradise was much less complicated; unity of the instinctive program. However, the stereo-optic affect of a self aware consciousness, offers the potential to update the programs of both centers; conscious evolution.
It's not quite weird and illogical at all. It seems you are just unfamiliar with how it can be used. For instance: Awareness - Wikipedia
Awareness is a relative concept. It may be focused on an internal state, such as a visceral feeling, or on external events by way of sensory perception.[3] It is analogous to sensing something, a process distinguished from observing and perceiving (which involves a basic process of acquainting with the items we perceive).
This is exactly how I am using it. Not weird or illogical at all, but the very opposite of that. I'm talking it's fundamental nature of perceiving by sense. Cognitive thought about the meaning of what is sensed and the highest levels comes way, way down the evolutionary path. But basic awareness is there at the most fundamental, subconscious levels.This is true for everyone everyday in everything we do. We may not be "consciousnessly aware" in the sense we are thinking about it, but everything is constantly being recognized or perceived or we are aware of it at that level nonetheless.
Not according to what I just quoted, nor the deeper levels of understanding what AWARENESS is about. If one just takes the colloquial meaning and go with that, well, then not a great deal of "awareness" on the subject can be understood.
It seems you are attracted to Descartes definitions of awareness or consciousness, as being only things one can actively think about it one's waking mind. There is no subconscious thought to him, but then you get to others who challenge that:
Locke's contemporary G.W. Leibniz, drawing possible inspiration from his mathematical work on differentiation and integration, offered a theory of mind in the Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) that allowed for infinitely many degrees of consciousness and perhaps even for some thoughts that were unconscious, the so called “petites perceptions”. Leibniz was the first to distinguish explicitly between perception and apperception, i.e., roughly between awareness and self-awareness.
I am refusing to limit my view or understanding of it to one narrow school of thought about the subject. Very much so I am refusing to do that. Just to show how anything but clear cut these things are, and the history of Western thought in refining its ideas about was consciousness is, post the Decorates mechanized view of reality, which you appear to be echoing. Note how what I bolded below is supporting the "weird and illogical" views.....
2.1 Creature Consciousness
An animal, person or other cognitive system may be regarded as conscious in a number of different senses.
Sentience. It may be conscious in the generic sense of simply being a sentient creature, one capable of sensing and responding to its world (Armstrong 1981). Being conscious in this sense may admit of degrees, and just what sort of sensory capacities are sufficient may not be sharply defined. Are fish conscious in the relevant respect? And what of shrimp or bees?
Wakefulness. One might further require that the organism actually be exercising such a capacity rather than merely having the ability or disposition to do so. Thus one might count it as conscious only if it were awake and normally alert. In that sense organisms would not count as conscious when asleep or in any of the deeper levels of coma. Again boundaries may be blurry, and intermediate cases may be involved. For example, is one conscious in the relevant sense when dreaming, hypnotized or in a fugue state?
Self-consciousness. A third and yet more demanding sense might define conscious creatures as those that are not only aware but also aware that they are aware, thus treating creature consciousness as a form of self-consciousness (Carruthers 2000). The self-awareness requirement might get interpreted in a variety of ways, and which creatures would qualify as conscious in the relevant sense will vary accordingly. If it is taken to involve explicit conceptual self-awareness, many non-human animals and even young children might fail to qualify, but if only more rudimentary implicit forms of self-awareness are required then a wide range of nonlinguistic creatures might count as self-conscious.
What it is like. Thomas Nagel's (1974) famous“what it is like” criterion aims to capture another and perhaps more subjective notion of being a conscious organism. According to Nagel, a being is conscious just if there is “something that it is like” to be that creature, i.e., some subjective way the world seems or appears from the creature's mental or experiential point of view. In Nagel's example, bats are conscious because there is something that it is like for a bat to experience its world through its echo-locatory senses, even though we humans from our human point of view can not emphatically understand what such a mode of consciousness is like from the bat's own point of view.
Subject of conscious states. A fifth alternative would be to define the notion of a conscious organism in terms of conscious states. That is, one might first define what makes a mental state a conscious mental state, and then define being a conscious creature in terms of having such states. One's concept of a conscious organism would then depend upon the particular account one gives of conscious states (section 2.2).
Transitive Consciousness. In addition to describing creatures as conscious in these various senses, there are also related senses in which creatures are described as being conscious of various things. The distinction is sometimes marked as that between transitive and intransitive notions of consciousness, with the former involving some object at which consciousness is directed (Rosenthal 1986).
My point being here, if you read that article I linked to, there are tons and tons of discussions about these things. It's not "weird or illogical", and is anything but clearcut. I take the much wider more fundamental and inclusive view that everything has awareness all the way up and all the way down. It's turtles all the way up, and all the way down", and rationally, logically, this can be supported and argued for.