What is the nature of consciousness

[henry quirk]

"a new born baby, we can say he has a personal existence, but we can't really imagine that he has what we think of as personality, or an identity"

A new born is bio-automata...practically speaking, it's not a 'person'.

Example: my nephew (now seven) became a person right before my eyes...it was a bit after his second birthday...one moment I was lookin' at a eating/pooping machine and, in the next, a person...this is anecdotal, I know, but it was his eyes...one moment, those eyes were empty then (like a switch was turned on) 'he' was there.

So: I say the newborn has experiences (all which contribute to it gettin' pushed into self-awareness) but those experiences aren't 'personal' 'cause -- in effect -- there's no one home to relish or dread the experiences.

Pile enough experience into that new human complexity and *WHAM!* you got yourself a person (a perspective, an identity, a self).

[duszek]

Do you remember this moment in your own life, Henry ?

Was it triggered by anything specific in the environment ?

[henry quirk]

Nope.

Got no clue when 'I' began.

I have hazy memories which, I'm told, go back to when I was wee thing in diapers but I can't say those memories are indicative of when I became a person (a self).

[James Markham]

Duszek, I wasn't writing with any particular person in mind, in fact, the point I am making is that at a certain point in our lives, personality is nearly absent, and at that point we are almost identical in terms of the way we are aware.

But to answer your question, I would say the first recollection of my perception being different from that of others, was at around five years old. It was my attitude towards animals, and in particular, how others seemed to lack my childish trait of projecting my own emotions into them, resulting in an overly compassionate empathy.

[James Markham]

Henry, that's my point, a baby is not a personality as we understand ourselves to be, which is why I'm saying their awareness of experience and events is possibly indistinguishable from one to the next.
Imagine you could become a series of different babies, who all lie in their cots on a postnatal ward, looking at the same type of ceiling tile, what would be the difference between each experience?

[duszek]

If the input from the outside world we tend to focus on our emotions.

The babies´ emotions could differ according to what they have experienced so far, a fearful mother or a relaxed and joyous mother.

[henry quirk]

"at a certain point in our lives, personality is nearly absent, and at that point we are almost identical in terms of the way we are aware"

Agreed.

Just don't think you can call that awareness 'personal'.

#

"what would be the difference between each experience?"

Nuthin', at first, but as experiences pile up and the brain and body get worked up and out, and the irrevocable 'I' blossoms, all bets are off.

And: because 'self' can vary wildly from one to the other, one can suss out that (from the start), there must be difference (in the flesh) that leads to difference (in 'selves').

##

"The babies´ emotions could differ according to what they have experienced so far"

True, but equally (or, more) important is that essential 'difference' (in the flesh) from which 'self' springs.

So: mebbe the new born isn't bio-automata after all...*shrug*

[EagerForTruth]

Ha, well now i come to one of the more difficult word used in all the ideas exchanged of this philosophy stuff (I dunno, I think I rather should've studied this subject more after making my way through many of your quesitons James

Tougher this time although I've referred to it many times, but to definte it - consciousness I'd suppose then for me, is the train that all individual manifestations of reality, which ultimately i consider as the one thing that can be called "real" with certainty. Much of the commenting after focuses on trying to find out why we perceive ourselves as separate from the rest. I guess rather reflexively, since we are all just singular manifestations of the same ultimate reality, consciousness is the ability of reality to be aware of itself. Each person I think is different - and not just people every single thing even maybe - from each other person (or object) because each is a unique expression of the same one. That's kinda tricky though because logically to say "reality" or "existence" or "infinity" is a single entity that we are part of, but then to also call ourselves our own individual entity produces a possible mathetmatical dilemma. If there is only one true reality, yet i exist and you exist, reality seems to be contradictory, in that there's 2 (well according to math) from there i'll take a roundabout....

Now wleg we hit the defintion issue with these subject matters again - our attempts to define what is around us and determine what is real are duplicitous to me, because in what i would call the true wonder of reality, and why existing is such a wonderous thing, is that the reality is it's a beautiful idea that reality, or consciousness, is such a gift that we can both all be one with it, yet at the same time each have our own singular perception within it that allows to experience it as our own. For the sake of one's own logic by which we expand our perceptions of reality, the definitions we use to define what is real are really only for us i think. Which covers James's question of personal existence. I might've expressed myself more effiencently in a couple other post however, had I done this one first.

[Ramu]

Is the adjective "personal" in "personal existence" defining or non-defining (= a mere additional attribute) ?

In other words: do we have two sub-wholes of existence in the whole of existence ? Personal existence and impersonal existence. ...

I use the terms "objective physical reality" and "subjective spiritual reality." God and angels are spiritual entities. Here is a link to what I wrote about this:

http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowals ... heist.html

Comments will be appreciated.

Ludwik

There is no such thing as objective reality. All we have are 1st person subjective experiences. 3 rd person objective is an invention. Its always couched in 1st person subjective always. An objective external reality is a.metaphysical assumption that you've made, nothing more.

[AlexW]

Pile enough experience into that new human complexity and *WHAM!* you got yourself a person (a perspective, an identity, a self).

There are ways to "measure" when the concept of self/identity takes hold - see: mirror test (especially: rouge test) - its basically the age when a small child is able to recognise itself in the mirror. It has been found to be strongly connected to the development of object permanence (the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be perceived). Children develop the concept of objects being permanent around 2 years of age - this is also when the self, the person, manifests as something apparently permanent. The self is suddenly seen as a special object - the subject - which travels more or less unchanged through an external, objective world.

Before this time there is no permanence and thus no identity - there is just whatever is being experienced, but no individual/separate experiencer.
This is sometimes also called the "natural state" - a state that is still present "inside" all of us, but that is covered up by the many conceptual layers of being a person. Most spiritual/mystical experiences are simply a (temporary) bypassing/removal of this conceptual, personal layer - what remains is an experience of one-ness, a direct experience that is not mediated or processed by the personality filter. It is devoid of identity and is sometimes described as pure awareness/consciousness knowing itself (in/as all that is being experienced).

[Dontaskme]

''Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. ... Western philosophers, since the time of Descartes and Locke, have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and identify its essential properties.'' ~Google.

______

The reason 'we' cannot identify consciousness is because 'we' are IT. . . as soon as 'we' say the words ''I am conscious'' duality is born, the illusion of separation. Consciousness is not an illusion because it is not a concept born, it's the unborn born in every moment, and that which is apparently born cannot be not born...so here, we have only the unborn born aka infinity for eternity.

Consciousness is not an experience, there is nothing outside of consciousness that can experience consciousness...Consciousness is perceived to perceive. Belief in the perceived births it into existence as an object, aka an illusionary thing of no thing .. for there is no thing outside of consciousness but consciousness itself. Things are images of the imagless, the imageless has no image of itself except as concept, an illusion, a mirror image, emptiness appearing full.

.

This is what Jesus, a metaphor for infinite consciousness meant by eternal life. If there is only eternal life, then there can be no separate thing living it.

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This advice is free of charge it has no copyright, you are free to take it on as your own knowledge.

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[TimeSeeker]

The fundamental property of consciousness is binary classification [1].
Being able to identify some criteria for categorisation and produce a classification rule [2]

P vs ¬P

I am conscious vs I am not conscious

My criterion for consciousness is recursive self-reference. I am using the word "I".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_classification
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_rule

[bahman]

Consciousness is a property of mind.

[Torchickens]

I have an idea kind of like what relativity says about how for instance the time on a clock goes faster if you're lying down than if you were on a plane. Maybe we are all conscious (which seems "obvious", but we may all experience consciousness in different ways like animals with senses we don't have, or whether you're intoxicated) but the circumstances at birth (on a quantum level, in addition to the chemical and classical physics ones) give us all our own realities in which you are the observer at a specific place in space-time. But yeah there is that question whether a robot still has consciousness, and if only one person can perceive it at the same time it becomes an assumption thing (while I think I am conscious, someone else has no proof if that proof must be empirical from them).

[TimeSeeker]

I have an idea kind of like what relativity says about how for instance the time on a clock goes faster if you're lying down than if you were on a plane. Maybe we are all conscious (which seems "obvious", but we may all experience consciousness in different ways like animals with senses we don't have, or whether you're intoxicated) but the circumstances at birth (on a quantum level, in addition to the chemical and classical physics ones) give us all our own realities in which you are the observer at a specific place in space-time. But yeah there is that question whether a robot still has consciousness, and if only one person can perceive it at the same time it becomes an assumption thing (while I think I am conscious, someone else has no proof if that proof must be empirical from them).

How would you tell if time is "going faster" or "slower" for you-the-consciousness?. You would have to have a procedure to differentiate the two cases.

The notion of an "inertial reference frame" is insufficient. We require an "objective" reference frame - that exists outside of "time".

How? That's the hard part