The Place of Value in a World of Fact

[DonSchaeffer]

In a previous discussion the subject of does life imply some kind of awareness came up. I know it's a kind of taboo subject among scientists who want to keep their precious distance. But the subject came up. I don't know what awareness means really--it has something to do with a process of making decisions that aren't based on simple mechanical rules. It also has to do with a pattern of using senses that influences behavior. It really is hard to define it, which is why people don't don't try. What use is awareness anyway? We can just forget the subject--but we don't want to and we are stubborn about it.

[Free2Fish]

LOL, I’ll bite. Awareness is really all about “knowing”. All “knowing” comes from perception via the various senses which in turn has been interpreted, one might even venture created by the brain. This interpretation, our reality, is then influenced by the biases we’ve developed over our lifetimes. Is there really an objective reality we can be aware of?
Signing off now, must get back to reality and my microscope.
Harry

[PeteM]

There's a huge literature on consciousness - which is somewhere between a twin to a kissing cousin to awareness.

Julian Jaynes thought we didn't become conscious until 3000 years ago (Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind). However, more recent research with primates shows they are almost surely self-aware. Consciousness seems to extend to a wide variety of other higher animals as well.

One somewhat humorous, but possibly very close take, is from Tor Norretranders (The User Illusion - Cutting Consciousness Down to Size) is that consciousness is like Microsoft's "Bob" (a sometimes annoying software user-interface popup from a two or three decades ago). We're exposed to gigabytes of perceptual input. Tor thinks consciousness is a sort of user interface to the hidden complexity of our subconscious experience and processing. That take sort of fits with Free2Fish's notion.

The list of takes on consciousness could go on for pages. Some think it's all physics, much of which we don't yet fully understand. Others argue that there seem to be emergent properties as simple units (e.g., neurons, transistors) form complex things (e.g., brains plus a lifetime of learned experiences or perhaps AI trained on petabytes of data).

Darn, Don - next thing you'll be pondering is free will in the animal kingdom, from protists to political partisans. I'm in the "we have it," but in a limited sense, camp.

[DonSchaeffer]

We are brothers! I'm thrilled. But you are a lot more sophisticated than I. I have been thinking about these things all my life but I'm too lazy to read. Please keep in touch.