The Private Lives Of Rocks

[Dalek Prime]

Jon David thinks about the view that everything has awareness.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/117/Th ... s_Of_Rocks

God damn bullshit! I am so sick of all this anthropomorphic romanticiizing. Just because one can think of something, doesn't give it equal credibility as an idea amongst all others.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

I love this idea.

[Greta]

It reminds me of a lovely comment from Michelle Thaller of NASA, who said something to the effect that she thinks of people as like mobile rocks because we are made of the same stuff, just configured differently.

I agree with the below quote from the article:

Speculation on the private lives of geological formations might seem a sterile intellectual game, but it has profound implications. The mechanistic worldview inherited from the Enlightenment distorts our self-image. As minds in an otherwise mindless cosmos, we cannot make ourselves at home. It also means we’re liable to see everything around us – minerals, plants, animals, even people – as just raw material to be exploited.

There’s a direct link between metaphysical materialism (the idea that matter is all that exists), economic materialism (the assumption that material possessions are all that matters), and full-blown ecological crisis. But economic materialism isn’t inevitable. Panpsychism can help open our eyes to the reality of pressing environmental concerns. “When the world is understood in panpsychist terms,” says Freya Mathews, “the whole spectrum of Western thought undergoes a profound shift, a shift away from the direction in which it has been drifting since the time of the scientific revolution.”

However, it's not realistic. Humanity appears more likely to start WWII than to respect nature as the indigenes did.

[Justintruth]

I think the idea that rocks are conscious fails for the following reasons:

The current laws of physics do not predict consciousness will ever occur - even for an arbitrary configuration of matter running for an arbitrary amount of time. If matter does become conscious, then there is some new principle required for a complete physical description. Yet the best potential scientific explanation is that it is our brains that are conscious. This does mean that matter has more to it that the current standard model of physics describes. All the facts are not in, and vitalism may resurrect itself in a new form as we explore neurology, but it is reasonable to speculate that certain configurations of perfectly ordinary matter as described by current physics can cause certain experiencing to occur once it is organized in certain ways. We don't know the scope of this - which configurations produce which experiencing - how many primary colors can be produced, for example, but probably we can develop the science to do so and update the physics with that knowledge as David Chalmers has popularized.

All the facts are not in but already it looks like interfering with the function of a brain, say giving an anesthetic for example, causes cessation of consciousness. If such a slight interference in the brain function causes loss of consciousness it is reasonable to conclude that turning a brain into a rock would cause complete loss of consciousness.

And I think the burden of proof is therefore on those who make the claim that rocks are conscious. They need some evidence for it. We have the evidence for brains from our own experience. I might, if I were to be unwisely skeptical, doubt you are conscious but not myself. If I were to raise that doubt about you to the level of a theoretical postulate however, then I would be in error, because I would then be required to explain the uniqueness of my brain and I cannot. Therefore it is correct to posit the existence of consciousness other than my own as well as my own. It is also reasonable to postulate that my experience of being able to know what you are thinking or feeling at least somewhat by reading your face and listening to your voice etc - not to mention the access given by a kiss, a caress, laughter or dance, - gives me valid access to you. Plenty of very rich wonderful access there!

It is easy to equivocate the notion that perfectly ordinary matter, if configured into a brain, will experience, with the notion that all perfectly ordinary material in any configuration will experience, i.e. that because the matter in the brain is just ordinary matter organized a certain way, that the fact of its ordinariness means that ordinary matter of any configuration - like a rock - can be conscious. This is a non sequitor. It ignores the possibility that the organization of a particular type is required. So if I took the material (mass-energy) of an ordinary rock and changed it into a functioning brain and thereby it became conscious then it is tempting to believe because of that, that the rocks themselves were capable of being conscious. But it does not mean that they are conscious prior to being formed into brains. It just means that if I configure a rock in a certain way - into a functioning brain for example - then ordinary matter will become conscious.

The philosophical interest in panpsychism is due to recent interest in theories that given that ordinary matter can be configured into a brain and that this causes consciousness, then we need to expand the ordinary physical laws to account for the fact that more than what is described in the physics occurs and to obtain a physical theory that describes which configurations produce which experiences. Panpsychism is brought up to illustrate an extreme example of such a theory but this can be dismissed by the evidence that we already have in anesthesiology.

No competent neurologist would agree that if my brain were turned into a rock that it would retain its conscious state or indeed have any conscious state at all. That is a scientific statement and like all science a kind of radical skepticism can be deployed to defeat it. You can ask how I know for sure and get into those wonderful versions of solipsism. But that just impoverishes our ability to describe the nature we do find and is incorrect theoretically.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

It reminds me of a lovely comment from Michelle Thaller of NASA, who said something to the effect that she thinks of people as like mobile rocks because we are made of the same stuff, just configured differently.

I agree with the below quote from the article:

Speculation on the private lives of geological formations might seem a sterile intellectual game, but it has profound implications. The mechanistic worldview inherited from the Enlightenment distorts our self-image. As minds in an otherwise mindless cosmos, we cannot make ourselves at home. It also means we’re liable to see everything around us – minerals, plants, animals, even people – as just raw material to be exploited.

There’s a direct link between metaphysical materialism (the idea that matter is all that exists), economic materialism (the assumption that material possessions are all that matters), and full-blown ecological crisis. But economic materialism isn’t inevitable. Panpsychism can help open our eyes to the reality of pressing environmental concerns. “When the world is understood in panpsychist terms,” says Freya Mathews, “the whole spectrum of Western thought undergoes a profound shift, a shift away from the direction in which it has been drifting since the time of the scientific revolution.”

However, it's not realistic. Humanity appears more likely to start WWII than to respect nature as the indigenes did.

Not all 'indigenes' were like that. The Maori used their resources like there was no tomorrow and ended up hunting many of them to extinction. They also committed genocide on the Moriori--a genuinely spiritual and ecologically aware people. The Easter Islanders made their own paradise uninhabitable to themselves.

[Justintruth]

It reminds me of a lovely comment from Michelle Thaller of NASA, who said something to the effect that she thinks of people as like mobile rocks because we are made of the same stuff, just configured differently.

I agree with the below quote from the article:

Speculation on the private lives of geological formations might seem a sterile intellectual game, but it has profound implications. The mechanistic worldview inherited from the Enlightenment distorts our self-image. As minds in an otherwise mindless cosmos, we cannot make ourselves at home. It also means we’re liable to see everything around us – minerals, plants, animals, even people – as just raw material to be exploited.

There’s a direct link between metaphysical materialism (the idea that matter is all that exists), economic materialism (the assumption that material possessions are all that matters), and full-blown ecological crisis. But economic materialism isn’t inevitable. Panpsychism can help open our eyes to the reality of pressing environmental concerns. “When the world is understood in panpsychist terms,” says Freya Mathews, “the whole spectrum of Western thought undergoes a profound shift, a shift away from the direction in which it has been drifting since the time of the scientific revolution.”

However, it's not realistic. Humanity appears more likely to start WWII than to respect nature as the indigenes did.

You might check out the work of Jane Goodall on chimpanzees. it turns out that chimpanzees and humans, unlike gorillas and orangutans sub-speciate. Also if you look at behaviors like hording and what we call the lust for power you can see that primate neurobiology most likely underlies a lot of the problems.

More fundamentally if you look at being, doing, and having and the relation with hormonally doped neurobiology I think useful explanations will emerge.

Most surprising for me is the way our hormonally doped brains influence our experience of ontology, for there are metaphysical ontological modes of experience that are not just described in neutral terms but rather are described ecstatically. The experiences of extreme alienation as well as those extreme mystical states are two ends of the same pole that governs our ontological experience of being. When you combine that with the explanations of extreme having - greed - or extreme doing - the will to power - and see how these interact socially with our loving experience of being you can begin to see how our primate neurobiology affects these problems.

it has the added benefit of explaining other aspects of our gender identities and how our family lives fit in.

I agree that pan psychism can cause an improvement in the level of consciousness of some individuals metaphysically, but you have to be very careful as the phenomenon of new age fundamentalism creeps in. The metaphysical insight given by certain scientific thoughts can be seen as scientific justification and you get all of these ideas about "vibrations" for example. Metaphysical insight is legitimate on its own. it is dangerous to use incorrect natural science to prop them up.

I think that the science of neurobiology would not agree that rocks are conscious. The way the image that they are plays in our own primate neurobiology metaphysically supports your agreement with the author that considering even rocks as conscious can possibly raise Metaphysical awareness and transform us culturally. In fairness I think the effect is small - even negligible - and will not rescue us much from all of the cultural and ecological damage we do. Still your agreement that it can do something is true I think. Scientific images have Metaphysical influence and the images of even rocks being conscious can help to what Alan Ginsberg the poet once called "humanizing the culture". (That Ginsberg said that was reported to me by an artist friend who had a conversation with him years ago. I have no printed source)

But for me the danger of fundamentalism must be avoided at all cost. Pan psychism is not a good scientific hypothesis I think now. . That ordinary matter can be arranged in conscious configurations does not mean that unarranged into a neurology or cybernetic device of some kind that it is conscious. Arranged into a rock it is best to assume that it is unconscious.

If we do that and study hormone doped neurobiological explanations of our experiences of being, doing, and having as they play out in our primate social behavior, I think we can retrieve the Metaphysical experiences associated with being and get people to see greed and the last for power as poor substitutes for managing the situation so that more of us experience the wonder and mystery of being and lead the fulfilling lives in the destiny of our being there as opposed to destroying the environment and configuring our technology into devices designed to kill the other tribe.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

It reminds me of a lovely comment from Michelle Thaller of NASA, who said something to the effect that she thinks of people as like mobile rocks because we are made of the same stuff, just configured differently.

I agree with the below quote from the article:

Speculation on the private lives of geological formations might seem a sterile intellectual game, but it has profound implications. The mechanistic worldview inherited from the Enlightenment distorts our self-image. As minds in an otherwise mindless cosmos, we cannot make ourselves at home. It also means we’re liable to see everything around us – minerals, plants, animals, even people – as just raw material to be exploited.

There’s a direct link between metaphysical materialism (the idea that matter is all that exists), economic materialism (the assumption that material possessions are all that matters), and full-blown ecological crisis. But economic materialism isn’t inevitable. Panpsychism can help open our eyes to the reality of pressing environmental concerns. “When the world is understood in panpsychist terms,” says Freya Mathews, “the whole spectrum of Western thought undergoes a profound shift, a shift away from the direction in which it has been drifting since the time of the scientific revolution.”

However, it's not realistic. Humanity appears more likely to start WWII than to respect nature as the indigenes did.

You might check out the work of Jane Goodall on chimpanzees. it turns out that chimpanzees and humans, unlike gorillas and orangutans sub-speciate. Also if you look at behaviors like hording and what we call the lust for power you can see that primate neurobiology most likely underlies a lot of the problems.

More fundamentally if you look at being, doing, and having and the relation with hormonally doped neurobiology I think useful explanations will emerge.

Most surprising for me is the way our hormonally doped brains influence our experience of ontology, for there are metaphysical ontological modes of experience that are not just described in neutral terms but rather are described ecstatically. The experiences of extreme alienation as well as those extreme mystical states are two ends of the same pole that governs our ontological experience of being. When you combine that with the explanations of extreme having - greed - or extreme doing - the will to power - and see how these interact socially with our loving experience of being you can begin to see how our primate neurobiology affects these problems.

it has the added benefit of explaining other aspects of our gender identities and how our family lives fit in.

I agree that pan psychism can cause an improvement in the level of consciousness of some individuals metaphysically, but you have to be very careful as the phenomenon of new age fundamentalism creeps in. The metaphysical insight given by certain scientific thoughts can be seen as scientific justification and you get all of these ideas about "vibrations" for example. Metaphysical insight is legitimate on its own. it is dangerous to use incorrect natural science to prop them up.

I think that the science of neurobiology would not agree that rocks are conscious. The way the image that they are plays in our own primate neurobiology metaphysically supports your agreement with the author that considering even rocks as conscious can possibly raise Metaphysical awareness and transform us culturally. In fairness I think the effect is small - even negligible - and will not rescue us much from all of the cultural and ecological damage we do. Still your agreement that it can do something is true I think. Scientific images have Metaphysical influence and the images of even rocks being conscious can help to what Alan Ginsberg the poet once called "humanizing the culture". (That Ginsberg said that was reported to me by an artist friend who had a conversation with him years ago. I have no printed source)

But for me the danger of fundamentalism must be avoided at all cost. Pan psychism is not a good scientific hypothesis I think now. . That ordinary matter can be arranged in conscious configurations does not mean that unarranged into a neurology or cybernetic device of some kind that it is conscious. Arranged into a rock it is best to assume that it is unconscious.

If we do that and study hormone doped neurobiological explanations of our experiences of being, doing, and having as they play out in our primate social behavior, I think we can retrieve the Metaphysical experiences associated with being and get people to see greed and the last for power as poor substitutes for managing the situation so that more of us experience the wonder and mystery of being and lead the fulfilling lives in the destiny of our being there as opposed to destroying the environment and configuring our technology into devices designed to kill the other tribe.

Could you explain what you mean by 'subspeciate'? Jane Goodall also interfered with the group she was studying, luring them into the open with bananas, causing aggressive and competitive group behaviour.

[Justintruth]

Could you explain what you mean by 'subspeciate'? Jane Goodall also interfered with the group she was studying, luring them into the open with bananas, causing aggressive and competitive group behaviour.

Within the scientific study of the behavior of social animals (behaviorism) subspeciation is defined to exist when the social behavior between two individuals cannot be explained or predicted without taking into account social relations that are not familial relations.

So if a pride of lions, related by blood, behaves one way with respect to members of its pride and very differently with respect to members of another pride then that behavior difference is not sub speciation. You can't predict the interaction of two individuals without knowing their pride membership but the pride is a related family at least mostly. But if a group of chimps not related by blood - not just siblings, uncles, aunts etc - and you can't predict the behavior of an interaction without knowing about them then sub speciation occurs.

The social behavior of insects I believe is completely free of sub speciation. It is rare in the animal community. I am not sure whether it is limited to primates. Do herds of deer compete? It looks like the royal dynasty could be an extension of the familial into the non-familial nation and may have been how sub speciating started in humans. Its speculative of course.

Anyway, I had not heard that Jan Goodall had interfered with the group she was studying. Was it enough to invalidate the result that chimps conduct war, that they patrol boundaries as a group and invade foreign territories? Where did you find out about it? Is there something you could recommend that I could read?

I had read a description of a group of male chimps that had cornered a female from another tribe. She approached a dominant male and touched his forearm as a submissive gesture. The dominant chimp took some leaves and wiped his arm. The other males took this as a signal (language?) and immediately attacked the female tearing her limbs off biting her face and drinking her blood.

Reminds me of Pontius Pilate cleaning his hands.

The whole notion of cleanliness plays in this. The idea of cleansing the race, ethnic cleansing, or racial hygiene is very important in many of the genocides that occur in human populations. Characterization of the opponent group as filthy insects is often present prior to genocide. I believe that this has deep roots in our sexuality as all of these hormone doped neurosystems seem to be. Look at the way we characterize certain sexual behaviors as "dirty" and the virgin as "immaculate". There is some kind of "cleansing" instinct operating in primate sub speciation. Usually the other is conceived of as "dirty" and the characterization is visceral - its not just baldly intellectual. To many, the experience of a member of another "inferior" group is similar to the experience of filth. Its beyond the intellect. My wife calls it the "heebie jeebies".

Alternatively the other can be seen as over clean or sterile. So the purity of some of the characters in 1984 for example - was it the Red Sash group? - is an example of a negative image of cleanliness.

All of these systems function I speculate by releasing similar hormones in various doses and modulating the ontological experience of being.

Studying compulsive forms of these behaviors my help. Studying horders or those that clean obsessively in FMRI may shed some insight on genocide ultimately. Why do they see and *feel* the others as "dirty" and why do they *feel* it is "right" to eliminate them? Studying the brains of say KKK members as images of black children are changed with white children and comparing them to images of extreme filth and clean neat folded linen or something may lead somewhere. I have not searched for these studies. They may have been already done.

I have even speculated that examining the hygiene of Fox newscasters may shed some light on their political affiliations...and yes I am mostly joking...but not completely

Ordinary rocks may become conscious and when they do what a wealth of experience and rage of behaviors they have! What is the spectrum and dimension of these experiences? How can it be spanned? Are there Eigen-experiences that can be added to model all possible "rock configurations" and define all of the possible organisms and *feelings* that can be engineered? Probably. I will unfortunately be long dead before it is understood though.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Could you explain what you mean by 'subspeciate'? Jane Goodall also interfered with the group she was studying, luring them into the open with bananas, causing aggressive and competitive group behaviour.

Within the scientific study of the behavior of social animals (behaviorism) subspeciation is defined to exist when the social behavior between two individuals cannot be explained or predicted without taking into account social relations that are not familial relations.

So if a pride of lions, related by blood, behaves one way with respect to members of its pride and very differently with respect to members of another pride then that behavior difference is not sub speciation. You can't predict the interaction of two individuals without knowing their pride membership but the pride is a related family at least mostly. But if a group of chimps not related by blood - not just siblings, uncles, aunts etc - and you can't predict the behavior of an interaction without knowing about them then sub speciation occurs.

The social behavior of insects I believe is completely free of sub speciation. It is rare in the animal community. I am not sure whether it is limited to primates. Do herds of deer compete? It looks like the royal dynasty could be an extension of the familial into the non-familial nation and may have been how sub speciating started in humans. Its speculative of course.

Anyway, I had not heard that Jan Goodall had interfered with the group she was studying. Was it enough to invalidate the result that chimps conduct war, that they patrol boundaries as a group and invade foreign territories? Where did you find out about it? Is there something you could recommend that I could read?

I had read a description of a group of male chimps that had cornered a female from another tribe. She approached a dominant male and touched his forearm as a submissive gesture. The dominant chimp took some leaves and wiped his arm. The other males took this as a signal (language?) and immediately attacked the female tearing her limbs off biting her face and drinking her blood.

Reminds me of Pontius Pilate cleaning his hands.

The whole notion of cleanliness plays in this. The idea of cleansing the race, ethnic cleansing, or racial hygiene is very important in many of the genocides that occur in human populations. Characterization of the opponent group as filthy insects is often present prior to genocide. I believe that this has deep roots in our sexuality as all of these hormone doped neurosystems seem to be. Look at the way we characterize certain sexual behaviors as "dirty" and the virgin as "immaculate". There is some kind of "cleansing" instinct operating in primate sub speciation. Usually the other is conceived of as "dirty" and the characterization is visceral - its not just baldly intellectual. To many, the experience of a member of another "inferior" group is similar to the experience of filth. Its beyond the intellect. My wife calls it the "heebie jeebies".

Alternatively the other can be seen as over clean or sterile. So the purity of some of the characters in 1984 for example - was it the Red Sash group? - is an example of a negative image of cleanliness.

All of these systems function I speculate by releasing similar hormones in various doses and modulating the ontological experience of being.

Studying compulsive forms of these behaviors my help. Studying horders or those that clean obsessively in FMRI may shed some insight on genocide ultimately. Why do they see and *feel* the others as "dirty" and why do they *feel* it is "right" to eliminate them? Studying the brains of say KKK members as images of black children are changed with white children and comparing them to images of extreme filth and clean neat folded linen or something may lead somewhere. I have not searched for these studies. They may have been already done.

I have even speculated that examining the hygiene of Fox newscasters may shed some light on their political affiliations...and yes I am mostly joking...but not completely

Ordinary rocks may become conscious and when they do what a wealth of experience and rage of behaviors they have! What is the spectrum and dimension of these experiences? How can it be spanned? Are there Eigen-experiences that can be added to model all possible "rock configurations" and define all of the possible organisms and *feelings* that can be engineered? Probably. I will unfortunately be long dead before it is understood though.

I couldn't find anything relating to 'subspeciation'. I'm still not sure what you mean.
Here's what Goodall had to say about her observation. She certainly should have known better than to interfere in that way, even back then. She may even have corrupted the evolutionary process.

''Secondly, at a few study sites the researchers fed the chimps, to get the chimps used them. In Goodall's case, this "provisioning" usually involved fruits like bananas. But she soon realised it was having a negative effect on the chimps.

"They were beginning to move about in large groups more often than they had ever done in the old days. Worst of all, the adult males were becoming increasingly aggressive… there was a great deal more fighting than ever before."

Wherever researchers provisioned, the chimps became more agitated and aggressive as they competed for these high-quality foods.''

[Justintruth]

I couldn't find anything relating to 'subspeciation'. I'm still not sure what you mean.

Here is what I mean by the term:

Within the scientific study of the behavior of social animals (behaviorism) subspeciation is defined to exist when the social behavior between two individuals cannot be explained or predicted without taking into account social relations that are not familial relations.[/quote]

I also did a search on the term and it looks like the term is being used now in the context of evolution and genetics which is definitely not how I was using it. I picked the term up more than a couple of decades ago and it was from a scientific description of primate behavior.

No matter how we describe it it is clear that the social behavior of humans is not organized solely by familial lines. We split on race, religion, tribe, ethnicity nationality, and other lines. This causes a lot of the problems we see.

My point in this thread is that normal matter - rocks - can become aware when they are formed into brains, and that profound instinctive experiencing is created by the configurations and that ontology needs to be aware of these natural effects.

As an example the differences in how we feel toward the groups we form are amazingly similar once we define the groups and see the symmetry. The appeal to "women and children" - the claim that the other group will attack "our" women and children is a biological instinct. The tolerance for rape that occurs in war zones is another example. Men who would normally not commit such acts can become almost monsters. Look at Mylai in Vietnam or some of the strategies for ethnic cleansing.

We can and must try to understand these human behaviors on many levels and one of them is that we are rocks that have been formed into devices that experience. This happened through evolution. We are a type of primate and our instinctual heritage must be parsed to understand the cause of our behavioral dysfunction. To what extent is it genetic and how are the genes expressed in the neurology and what feelings and thoughts does that create in us. "Cleansing" based on race or religion or ethnicity etc are biological problems that will only be completely understood when our neurology and it's relation to our hormonal systems are understood. And if we are to engineer future conscious life forms we must know what configuring rocks in a certain way or other will do to the thoughts and feelings that the matter will have.

Soldier heros are praised in the same terms on both sides.

Sounds like Goodall had problems in her work but chimp behavioral studies have confirmed that chimps do form these groups that are not just familial and that knowing the membership in the particular groups is necessary to know the behavior. It's a very different situation than with orangutans. Much closers to humans.

Certainly forming these groups occurs for humans. A Jewish kid in a Palestinian neighborhood will not be treated the same way as a Palestinian kid will, but will be treated in a much more similar way in his "own" Jewish neighborhood. Same with a black kid or a white kid in "their" neighborhoods. Or a Crip or a Blood or an Indian or a Pakistanian, or a Mexican worker or an American worker. etc etc etc

When we learn how rock assemblies experience then we will have a big piece of the puzzle and we can see how our understanding proceeds. My speculation is that a lot of this is affected by hormones or other "psychotopical" chemicals released into the brain.

[Greta]

I don't know if it was my early teens collecting gemstones and making jewellery, but I've always felt rocks were terribly underestimated - beautiful and important things reduced to being the poster child for utter lifelessness and pointlessness.

Since this is a speculative subject, I'd like to take off the safety harness now and go for it ... not as much as most forum members, of course, but more than usual :)

In short: I like the idea of continuums of life and consciousness; it seems more "natural" than the alternative and makes more sense on every level. This is not a fundamentalist denial of emergence, just a recognition that what emerges is necessarily based on what came before.

Consider "nonliving" entities like prions, which are basically proteins that activate in a parasitic way similar to that of viruses, which themselves are like microscopic "organic crystals", which of course can famously activate to parasitic modes under certain circumstances. Then consider regular crystals, which grow from nubs, develop, interact, and finally disaggregate. The shape and content of those initial nubs acts as a template (as does DNA, albeit non hereditary) in determining aspects of the "fully grown crystal".

Crystals are not life as we know it, but they are ordered in ways that is suggestive of proto-life - genesis, growth, development, change, interactions, destruction and reuse. They obviously have no consciousness, but they do have chemical reactions, which are the basis of senses and emotions. So, while pen and paper are hardly equivalent to a supercomputer, there is a fundamental relationship between them. A roughly similar relationship seems to be present between the chemical reactions of rocks and the conscious reactions of animals, the latter being basically complex and ordered versions of what rocks do.

However, the idea of "consciousness on a continuum" needs commonsense applied (about as rare as hens' teeth online, alas). Bottom line: things on a continuum are not the same, especially if they are at opposite ends of that continuum. For example, size is a continuum - from subatomic scales to an undefined maximum. You don't say something small "lacks any size" (unless Planck scale) and appreciate the vast differences between molecules and stars. By the same token, we don't equate the unconscious reactions in rocks with the conscious reactivity of brained animals.

Heat is another continuum where the same point can be made, but perhaps more clearly (especially given the intrinsic relationship between heat and life). If an entity is 10,000K you will consider it to be very hot. If an object is at a temperature of 1K (about -272C) we will not consider it hot - but the object is not entirely lacking in heat either. Similarly, there is a continuum of consciousness, depending on how loosely you define consciousness. If not, then a pertinent continuum to consciousness is at least one of reactivity.

Continuing with the heat analogy, if we were scaling consciousness from "absolute zero" to an undetermined ceiling, rocks of all types would score more highly than, say, neutrinos, which barely react with anything. Geology seems like the idiot bastard son locked under the staircase as compared with the complex cleverness of biology but, if AI develops the way many experts think it will, one day our silicon masters may wonder how conscious biological organisms are, or if they are unknowingly entirely subject to the instinctive chemical processes that drive them :)

[Dalek Prime]

I don't know if it was my early teens collecting gemstones and making jewellery, but I've always felt rocks were terribly underestimated - beautiful and important things reduced to being the poster child for utter lifelessness and pointlessness. You must be referring to the 'rocks' between men's legs...

Since this is a speculative subject, I'd like to take off the safety harness now and go for it ... not as much as most forum members, of course, but more than usual

In short: I like the idea of continuums of life and consciousness; it seems more "natural" than the alternative and makes more sense on every level. This is not a fundamentalist denial of emergence, just a recognition that what emerges is necessarily based on what came before.

Consider "nonliving" entities like prions, which are basically proteins that activate in a parasitic way similar to that of viruses, which themselves are like microscopic "organic crystals", which of course can famously activate to parasitic modes under certain circumstances. Then consider regular crystals, which grow from nubs, develop, interact, and finally disaggregate. The shape and content of those initial nubs acts as a template (as does DNA, albeit non hereditary) in determining aspects of the "fully grown crystal".

Crystals are not life as we know it, but they are ordered in ways that is suggestive of proto-life - genesis, growth, development, change, interactions, destruction and reuse. They obviously have no consciousness, but they do have chemical reactions, which are the basis of senses and emotions. So, while pen and paper are hardly equivalent to a supercomputer, there is a fundamental relationship between them. A roughly similar relationship seems to be present between the chemical reactions of rocks and the conscious reactions of animals, the latter being basically complex and ordered versions of what rocks do.

However, the idea of "consciousness on a continuum" needs commonsense applied (about as rare as hens' teeth online, alas). Bottom line: things on a continuum are not the same, especially if they are at opposite ends of that continuum. For example, size is a continuum - from subatomic scales to an undefined maximum. You don't say something small "lacks any size" (unless Planck scale) and appreciate the vast differences between molecules and stars. By the same token, we don't equate the unconscious reactions in rocks with the conscious reactivity of brained animals.

Heat is another continuum where the same point can be made, but perhaps more clearly (especially given the intrinsic relationship between heat and life). If an entity is 10,000K you will consider it to be very hot. If an object is at a temperature of 1K (about -272C) we will not consider it hot - but the object is not entirely lacking in heat either. Similarly, there is a continuum of consciousness, depending on how loosely you define consciousness. If not, then a pertinent continuum to consciousness is at least one of reactivity.

Continuing with the heat analogy, if we were scaling consciousness from "absolute zero" to an undetermined ceiling, rocks of all types would score more highly than, say, neutrinos, which barely react with anything. Geology seems like the idiot bastard son locked under the staircase as compared with the complex cleverness of biology but, if AI develops the way many experts think it will, one day our silicon masters may wonder how conscious biological organisms are, or if they are unknowingly entirely subject to the instinctive chemical processes that drive them