Consciousness: Dennett says it is an illusion (General)

by dhw, Friday, October 04, 2019, 09:54 (1663 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Animals do not have consciousness with self-awareness They are simply conscious. Why do you constantly ignore the point?

dhw: You wrote: “Consciousness is only present in humans”, thereby contradicting your statement: “I still view that animals with a brain are conscious”. If you had written “Self-awareness is only present in humans”, I would not have corrected you.

DAVID: My definitions and yours are different. All animals are aware and therefore conscious.

And that is why I pointed out that it was wrong to say “consciousness is only present in humans.”

DAVID: By definition only humans have consciousness which causes self-awareness.

I don’t know why you’ve put in “by definition”, but you are merely repeating what I have said: “self awareness is only present in humans”. I don’t know why you insist on arguing when we agree! You simply made a mistake when you wrote that “consciousness is only present in humans.”

EGNOR: "...if consciousness is non-physical, how could it evolve? Darwinian natural selection can only act on a physical attribute."

dhw: […] In a nutshell: neither evolution nor natural selection can explain the origin of physical life or – if it exists – of immaterial “life”, including consciousness, but both the material and the immaterial can be changed by evolution, and the survival of the changes will be determined by natural selection.

DAVID: I think you are wrong. I don't see evolution or natural selection acting on consciousness which is immaterial. Of course we do not know why or how it originated.

You don’t see that there has been a progression in the level of consciousness from bacteria or, since you deny them consciousness, let’s say ants and monarch butterflies and weaverbirds to whales and dogs and apes, and finally to humans. You have already acknowledged earlier that human intelligence/consciousness is a major factor in the successful survival of our species – and natural selection, as we have agreed, explains why some attributes and organisms survive while others don’t. You can’t see that such immaterial things as language, social customs, religions, philosophy evolve as each generation builds on the work of its predecessors – and as evolution proceeds, some become extinct by a process of natural selection. How many people still believe in the gods who were supposed to live on Mount Olympus? In the context of our discussion on Egnor’s point above, he has wrongly equated evolving with originating, and whether you are a dualist or a materialist, the fact remains that we do not know the origin of physical life or of non-physical consciousness, but both have evolved from comparatively simple beginnings to their current levels, and natural selection has determined what has survived.