You’ve stated this so matter of factly that I imagine you have knowledge that somehow has alluded most people.
You mention gradients, which implies you can measure the delta/change of conscious, which implies you have a solid working definition, AND a static still point that does not change which this “consciousness” gradually changes.
From my perspective, which is first person pov, if I can detect changes in my “consciousness”, then where am I looking from to _notice_ this change? Is consciousness not the requirement of change detection?
When I say consciousness is self-evident, I get there by asking myself what it is like to be me.
Whatever consciousness is, it seems vanishingly unlikely that the philosophers talking about it for thousands of years are not talking about this experience I have of being “here now” looking out of my eyes with a constant shower of sensations and interpretations coursing over and by me.
I am not my fingers or hair or forehead in the same vital way that I am this nexus of awareness situated right behind my eyes. But when I am asleep some parts of that awareness are gone. When I am knocked out (by head injury or anesthesia) I so little awareness that I seem to have time traveled when I wake up. (my heart operation seemed to take about one second, and then I teleported to the recovery room).
Sometimes I am very alert, sometimes I am drifting and blinking out. Of course there a gradations of consciousness. Try listening to a book while you are going to sleep.
Begs the question: by what metric are you using to track the change/staticity?
I don’t see how one can concretely come to the conclusion of whether it changes or stays the same, when the presence of consciousness itself is a prerequisite of making that very claim
Well if you believe there's something magical about consciousness I could see why you'd believe the same person's consciousness at different points in time is the same consciousness.
If you believe consciousness is a function of sentience and self-awareness, and presumably that AI can one day be conscious (not saying it is right now), then I don't see how you can believe consciousness is persistent.
If the AI is copied/moved to a different server, is it the same consciousness? Or in Star Trek when you get beamed up are you the same consciousness?
Safe to say you tend to lean towards your second presentation of consciousness.
I tend to lean towards the idea that conscious is akin to a field in the sense of an electron field - that what we can measure are simply “excitations” of a more subtle field. Not a perfect metaphor, but it’s the closest thing to what matches my meditative experiences. IMO, it’s illogical for me to let another subjective being define what my substrate is, so I primarily rely on meditation and then supplement with objective observations.
All in all it really depends on what you define as consciousness. The issue that I have with most “objective” interpretations of consciousness is that we can only measure the excitations of this mysterious “life” thing is. If there is more to us than can be measured, e.g, that there are first person experiences that can be felt subjectively but not measured objectively, then any objective measure of consciousness will likely be limited. Consciousness seems from my pov to be the Achilles heal of the axiomatic assumptions of our scientific paradigm (at least in the west)
In response to your question, it depends on your definition of consciousness. Is neural activity the source of consciousness, or is neural activity the result of consciousness? How can we know for sure which?
The me who is engrossed in a conversation with a peer over dinner at night focusing on the topic at hand surely is a different consciousness as the me fighting to stay awake just after lunch. They think and emotionally experience very different things.
The human body is driven by a small percentage of the overall genome. It remains to be seen if that small percentage really doesn’t play a part… we tend to remember those who scored the goal, but often forget about what it took for the scorer to have a shot in the first place…
That’s… wrong? The amount of plastic would decrease every day (assuming no new production), so 0.05% of that amount would not be a constant number. Your daily_degradation is incorrect.
The premise that needs to be scrutinized is whether what we are deeming a “disability” is actually that. Thinking in systems, a component’s calibration (whether it is able or not) to a system can change due to the system as a whole changing (political, economic, cultural pressure).
One example is how the change from hunter/gatherer to agricultural lifestyles may have rendered the strengths of the hunter’s brain a weakness in an agricultural society.
The issue is nobody is convincing me that being unable to use context and sensory input properly would be advantageous in our current society. Because it wouldn't. And that's the end of that.
I don't have a definite conclusion on anything, but I remember having this discussion with a friend a long time ago, and it made me think... What he was trying to convince me was that all of those things you mention can be seen as subclasses of other natural things:
Digital simulations are self-explanatory - All things simulated must have an existing thing they are simulating. Digital is one type of representation of an already existing thing. It can be seen as a subclass of concept/drawing/painting/.
Branching timelines are more abstract, but it's ultimately based on the idea of a tree. Dilemmas over branching decisions have existed as long as we have been able to think. We branch timelines in our imaginations while playing chess or doing any strategic endeavor where decisions and responses to those decisions matter. FFT: Decision tree, binary tree, random forests, etc. These don't quite cover the complexity of QM, but it's hard to ignore that there is overlap.
A nuke is a type of bomb, which is a type of rapid expansion, which is just an expansion of something (volcano, lightning, comets, etc...)
My friend's point was that of course a caveman won't be thinking about quantum mechanics, but they were thinking about the more basic things that ultimately led to their descendants thinking about QM.
Yes, it's a projection of fantasies, however your conclusion in unnecessarily pessimistic. It could be that these fantasies come from mass media.
When we know nothing about a topic (UNKNOWN), anything stated about it in the positive seems plausible -> Art creators play with the UNKNOWN (supernatural, aliens, <insert any person/place/thing that we know little-to-nothing about>) to add plausibility -> The content of that medium becomes the first contact with the UNKNOWN for many people -> When the UNKNOWN becomes known then people still have the ideas that were propagated -> We get to your comment.
It's not necessarily that people have a world domination complex.
You mention gradients, which implies you can measure the delta/change of conscious, which implies you have a solid working definition, AND a static still point that does not change which this “consciousness” gradually changes.
From my perspective, which is first person pov, if I can detect changes in my “consciousness”, then where am I looking from to _notice_ this change? Is consciousness not the requirement of change detection?