Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital (Humans)

by dhw, Tuesday, September 13, 2016, 11:56 (2992 days ago) @ David Turell

David's comment: Stimuli are one aspect of developing consciousness. He certainly doesn't give us a full explanation of consciousness. My bolded section is to point out the automaticity of cell response to stimuli he is suggesting. His essay also shows how the physics of biology is important.-Dhw: He gives us no explanation at all. To me it is self-evident that you cannot have consciousness without something to be conscious of. Stimuli give an organism something to be conscious of. As usual, you focus on the automatic responses of cells to stimuli, whereas my hypothesis of cellular intelligence focuses on how cell communities process the information provided by the stimuli before they take a decision on how to behave. To assess whether the wood tick is conscious or not, one would have to conduct experiments, i.e. devise problems for it to solve before it can get to the blood it needs for survival. As discussed under (so-called) "realism vs empiricism", that would be the empirical approach, which can hardly be applied to the theory that God showed the weaverbird how to build its nest.-DAVID: He is a leading philosopher read widely by others. It was just of general interest to present him as an example of how far we are from explaining consciousness.-Sorry if my response seemed a little ungracious. You are providing us with an amazing array of views and developments in many different fields, and in adding my comments to yours, I am only trying to clarify some of the ideas we discuss. In this case, there were two: I agreed with you that the references to stimuli did not explain consciousness, but I thought your focus on the automaticity of cell response required a very conscious response from me! It also tied in rather neatly with our dispute over your claim to be an empiricist!