I'm inclined to believe every dynamic interconnected system is "conscious" to some degree. Not 1:1 with human consciousness obviously, but the same base phenomenon.

The main problem is that there aren't very good metrics to distinguish how primitive a consciousness is. Where do you draw the line between consciousness and reflex? Is each of your cells conscious in its own impossibly tiny way?

[–] auraithx@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago (7 children)

The line is it being a conscious effort.

Reflexes weren’t a conscious effort.

[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Sure, how do you detect conscious effort from outside?

[–] m_f@discuss.online 3 points 1 week ago

Yeah, reflexes could be considered a conscious effort of a part of your body. Or your immune system might be considered "conscious" of a virus that it's fighting off. What's a testable definition of "conscious" that excludes those?

I think that "conscious" is also a relative term, i.e. "Conscious of what?" A cell in your body could be said to be conscious of a few things, like its immediate environment. It's clearly not conscious of J-pop though. But to be fair to it, none of us are "really" conscious of say Sagittarius B2 or an organism living at the bottom of the ocean.

The best way I've found to think about it is that consciousness can be thought of as a world model. The bigger the world model, the more consciousness it could be said to have. Some world models might be smaller, but contain things that bigger ones don't though. Worms don't understand what an airplane is, but humans also don't really understand the experience of wriggling through soil.

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